Free Republic

During an interview with MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle, Democrat nominee for president Vice-President Kamala Harris tried to refute Ruhle's fact-check that the tax cuts passed during Trump's term as president weren't only for the rich by explaining the math. "Okay, say there's an across-the-board 10% cut," Harris began. "The rich person making $200,000 a year saves $20,000, but the middle class person making $30,000 saves only $3,000. Worse, the person on welfare who doesn't earn any income gets no savings. I say, once someone earns more than a middle class income that person already has more than they need. They should...

Key Takeaways: Harris frequently claims that she had a “middle-class” childhood.Evidence shows that Harris actually came from a life of privilege.Nothing Harris says can be trusted.Sources: Breitbart News, USA TodayIn the weeks since Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, she’s frequently claimed that she had a “middle-class” childhood when she was growing up. Like most things that come out of her mouth, however, this has seemingly turned out to be a blatant lie. Harris has often alleged that she is from Oakland, a blue-collar California city with a large black population. Last month, she proudly described herself as “a...

Vice President Kamala Harris has tried to portray her upbringing as “middle class” and even working class — touting a summer job at McDonald’s and claiming to be from Oakland, a blue-collar city with a large black population. However, a close look at her childhood shows that Harris and her younger sister grew up with many opportunities that many “middle class” children do not have, such as living abroad, private school education, and growing up in some of the wealthiest locales in the world.

However, unfortunately for that narrative, the politics editor at Breitbart News happens to have grown up in the same neighborhood Harris lived in from when she was 12 to 18 and can report that calling herself “middle class” is definitely a stretch. On Labor Day, Harris put on one of her myriad fake dialects to address a working-class crowd in Detroit, Michigan. However, it is virtually impossible for Harris to have organically adopted that accent — or “code switch,” as the propagandists at the Associated Press refer to it — given that not only did she not grow up anywhere...

Under Bidenomics and Fed monetary “policies”, we now have the wreck of the US middle class. To begin with, America’s paychecks are bigger than 40 years ago, but purchasing power of those larger paychecks is about the sames as it was 40 years ago. Great job Washington DC!!! … NOT!!!! Meanwhile, credit card delinquencies are at the highest level since 1991. Americans are feeling extreme financial stress. Coping with Bidennomics and The Fed has been most difficult. Especially if you listened to Biden’s D-Day speech (almost stolen word-for-word from a Ronald Reagan speech). Demented Joe Biden being led by the...

Staying in the middle class takes a lot of work, according to a new analysis. A look at the numbers from the website GOBankingRates.com found that it took a nearly 42 percent increase in income to remain in the middle class from 2012, the midpoint of the Obama administration, to 2022, the middle of the Biden administration. The site published a state-by-state listing of what it takes to be in the middle class, defining the term as people with an income no less than two-thirds of the median income and no more than double that figure. Although the national minimum...

In a recent tweet, a talented financial analyst and investor stated: “The “debt is unsustainable” narrative has been around for 40 years plus. What’s astonishing to me is how the people who push this narrative never ask themselves, “Why has it been sustainable for so long?”.There is a widespread idea that the fiscal imbalances of a world reserve currency issuer would end in an Argentina-style bankruptcy. However, the manifestation of unsustainability did not even appear as drastic in Argentina itself. Hey, Argentina continues to exist, doesn’t it?Excessive public debt is unsustainable when it becomes a burden on productive growth and...

The progressive left will never, ever understand what real Americans want from their government, because real Americans just want to be left alone by their government. They think we can be bought, they think we can be manipulated into jealousy which will override our natural instincts. They are wrong. The games that work on their weak-minded coastal voters doesn’t work in “flyover” country, and it never will. You hear it all the time: Why are these people “voting against their interests?” The vapid husks of humans on MSNBC ask that regularly. They think they can buy votes of Midwesterners and...

Witness the moral and fiscal confusion of New York’s welfare-obsessed leaders. The state’s Medicaid program is billions of dollars in the red. Gov. Hochul announced a plan last month to cut $1.2 billion in Medicaid funding, which she’ll finalize Thursday. Yet she’s also expanding Medicaid for children whose parents make too much money. She’s making a middle-class entitlement New York doesn’t need and can’t afford. Here’s the backstory.

Things we once enjoyed have suddenly gotten so much worse. Not just a little worse, but way worse. You pay more, you get less, and it sucks. Social media was on fire this week in the wake of the Claudine Gay incompetence scandal at Harvard, the 737 IKEA MAX airplane scandal at Boeing, and the ongoing scandal of fanatic, destructive DEI hiring rules at airlines, air traffic control towers, colleges, corporate America, and everywhere else that matters. Things got so wild that Elon Musk replied positively to one of my anti-DEI screeds, and Matt Walsh credited me for some of...

Occasional guest columnist Karl Brauneis writes, "The Threatened and Endangered Species Act actually did more for attorneys and environmental elites then it did for the wildlife it was designed to protect. The few got rich while the working men and woman and the forest itself suffered." In 1974 I was a rookie on the Bighorn Inter-Regional Fire Suppression Crew at Greybull, Wyoming. The crew name was later changed to the Wyoming Hot Shots. As a “new man” I was classified as a Government Service (GS) - 3 and made $3.08 per hour. We also earned overtime pay (time and ½)...

An intriguing shift is observed among almost a third of millionaires in the U.S., who now identify themselves as part of the middle class, according to MoneyWise. A Bloomberg study further reveals that 25% of America’s “regular rich,” earning at least $175,000 annually, perceive themselves as “very poor,” “poor,” or “getting by but things are tight.” This surprising self-assessment raises questions about the sustainability of such economic dynamics. Simultaneously, the housing market paints a challenging picture. Monthly mortgage payments, hitting unprecedented levels near $3,000, are contributing to historical highs in the US housing market. The perception of a $1 million...

Can an economy in which 10% of the households qualify as middle class claim to offer widespread opportunities for secure prosperity? No, it cannot.Defining the middle class is a perpetually popular parlor game because it's well-known that the foundation of widespread prosperity is a broad-based middle class and a sturdy ladder of social mobility that enables those below the middle class to work their way up to middle class security.Here's an example of a typical trope on the subject: What Does It Take To Be Middle Class?The topic is also a perennial favorite because the middle class is losing ground....

Only a small share of millionaires say they feel wealthy,.. Persistent inflation has taken a toll on most Americans’ financial security, making it harder to feel well off.. What does it take to be rich? “The short answer is more... Feeling “rich” is increasingly elusive. Even among millionaires, only 8% would characterize themselves as wealthy these days. Roughly 60% of investors with $1 million or more of investable assets said they are more likely upper middle class, ... Even doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals — also referred to as the “regular rich” — who benefit from stable jobs,...

"Bidenflation" stands at 16.7%, exposing a significant increase in prices since President Biden took office Real wages have declined under Biden's watch, forcing people to cut back on various expenditures The American economy is likely to experience a protracted period of stagflation, characterized by economic stagnation accompanied by high inflation "Bidenomics" is a failure, and Biden's misdirected energy policy is the root cause of these issuesMore than six out of every ten (61%) Americans live paycheck to paycheck.American credit card debt has surged by 38%, increasing from $743.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021 to a recent total of...

America’s middle class is being systematically eviscerated. When the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system during the pandemic, most Americans didn’t realize what that would do to them. That money certainly made the wealthy a whole lot wealthier, but it also dramatically increased the cost of living for the rest of us. So now inflation has been rising much faster than paychecks have, and the cost of living has become exceedingly oppressive. In fact, last year we witnessed the largest decline in real median household income in more than a decade… "The official tally is in...

The decline of California under one-party Democrat rule has been one of the long-running themes of this blog. Today Victor Davis Hanson discusses how California’s wealthy destroyed the middle class with policies whose baleful effects they knew wouldn’t fall on them.… “The irony is that, as we created more wealth and more leisure, because of the very success of the middle class citizen, the middle class citizen and his central role in western government was forgotten.” “California in the 1960s had the largest middle class in the United States. California had the finest educational system. California invented the idea of...

Victor Davis Hanson explains how the middle class in California is struggling due to high taxes and heavy regulations that fall heavily on small business owners. As a result, many are leaving the state, causing the middle class to shrink and leaving California with the highest number of homeless people and welfare recipients in the US

“This new policy by the Biden administration is a slap in the face to every consumer in the nation who worked hard to develop a good credit score. Forcing them to subsidize lower scored buyers adds insult to the injury of the higher fees they are now required to pay. This is the latest in a disturbing pattern of Biden’s big government intervention into the lives of hard-working Americans in order to push his progressive social agenda..."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently announced a 2024 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, suggested on Saturday that the American middle class was “systematically” wiped out as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns. “The strength of a nation comes from a strong economy and a vibrant middle class, and we have wiped out the middle class in the country systematically,” Kennedy Jr. told Fox News‘ Neil Cavuto.