Free Republic

This cohort leans Republican now more than ever; a Gallup poll this year shows they favor the GOP by a whopping 25 percentage points. It was as if the Democratic Party didn’t understand how much they needed labor. Oddly, it appears they still don’t. “The working-class voters in my county tend to wonder if the party still wants them,” says Mark Hackel, the Democratic chief executive of Macomb County, Mich., where voters favored Trump over Clinton by 11 percentage points. “They’re not really sure where they fit in.” Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist who helped guide Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s...

Democrats are choking on crow for opposing this tax bill. Are they this economically illiterate? You pass the most extensive tax reform in nearly 30 years, it creates a better job creating and investing environment, and companies begin to boost U.S. investment, dole out bonuses to workers, some increase wages, and make declarations that charitable donations will go up. Yeah, that sounds bad, or something. It all centers on the notion that the Left thinks that your money is their money, and that the government, preferably run by over-educated, snobby liberal elitists, know best to allocate how that money is...

Well, Democratic spin surely has the middle class skeptical of the Republican tax bill. On Friday, President Trump signed the most extensive tax reform in 30 years. It was framed as a giveaway to the wealthy and something akin to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by congressional Democrats. Not a single Democrat voted for the bill. In reality, itÂ’s a middle class tax cut. Eighty percent of Americans for at least the next eight years will be paying less. The analysis says it. And now CBS News spoke to three families from Providence, Rhode Island, Fresno, California, and Cary,...

<p>I calculated federal income taxes for two hypothetical working class couples filing jointly under the new senate proposal compared to current law, taking the standard deduction in each case (see the pdf at source).</p> <p>The first working class family has a combined income of $100,000 and if my calculations are NOW correct would owe $10,948 in federal income taxes under current law with an effective tax rate of 10.9%.</p>

A recently-released research study sheds light on the values of white working-class voters in the United States and the reasons these voters strongly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Three researchers from three different universities authored the study, titled “White Working-Class Views on Belonging, Change, Identity and Immigration.” Open Society Foundations, a network of political organizations controlled by left-wing billionaire George Soros, funded the study. The trio of researchers conducted the study by visiting four places between August 2016 and March 2017: Birmingham, Alabama; Dayton, Ohio; Tacoma, Washington; Phoenix, Arizona; and — for some reason — the New...

In the US, death rates for middle-aged white working-class Americans are bucking a global trend. Instead of falling as treatments for killers like heart disease and cancer improve, death rates for white Americans without a college degree are on the rise, largely driven by increased rates of drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol use. These are considered "deaths of despair," Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton write in a new Brookings Paper on Economic Activity that describes the trend. The study follows up on Case and Deaton's previous work, which caused a stir in 2015 when it first revealed these...

By embracing Donald Trump, the building trades are selling out the movement for greater equality for all working people. Days after the inauguration, the leaders of several building trade unions met with President Donald Trump at the White House, outraging those on the left who want organized labor to lead the resistance to the president’s anti-worker policies. The building trades cited Trump’s call for infrastructure investment and their warm personal relationship with him as reasons to be optimistic about his presidency. As reported in The New York Times, Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trade Unions, stated, “We have...

Many of the dominant images from President Trump’s first 10 days in office make it look as if the country is turning on him. The millions who protested him at women’s marches across the country. The thousands who jammed airports over the weekend to support immigrants and refugees hurt by his travel ban. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely any of this early backlash will mean much to the swing-state voters who sent Trump to the White House to deliver a message that the political system wasn’t working for them. “Is the white, blue-collar voter in Pennsylvania going to be upset by all...

Determined to hold around two dozen Senate seats in 2018, Democrats will use the coming series of confirmation hearings to try to distinguish themselves from President-elect Donald Trump’s billionaire nominees and convince working-class voters who elected him that he’s not on their side. While Democrats have little leverage to stop the Republican’s picks in the Senate, they still plan a fight. To highlight what they say is the hypocrisy of Trump’s campaign promise to be a champion for the economically struggling little guy, they’ll focus on the nominees’ wealth, ties to Wall Street and willingness to privatize Medicare, among other...

ITALY is set to deal a hammer blow to its government as the latest polls revealed voters will punish Matteo Renzi's administration in the upcoming referendum. The prime minister's failure to reach out to working class suggest large regions will snub Mr Renzi's plan for constitutional reform. A Demos poll has revealed Mr Renzi's reforms will be rejected by an 11 percentage point margin in the south of the country - where most of the poorest regions are located - compared with a seven-point margin across the country. As the nation prepares for a momentous referendum, which could spark an...

On Thursday morning the "Today" show had a segment with a psycologist who was there to guide parents on how to explain Hillary Clinton's loss to their children. "Well that is interesting, they sure didn't have a child psycologist on to explain to my children the loss of Mitt Romney, or John McCain. You just simply did not have that," said a suburban mother sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office with the morning show streaming on the television. The young mother, an IT professional who lives in Pittsburgh, the "Paris of Appalachia," said she was stunned once...

My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment. He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept...

As the reality of President-elect Donald Trump settled in very early Wednesday morning, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summed up an explanation common to many on the left: The Republican nominee pulled ahead thanks to old-fashioned American racism. But the attempt to make Trump’s victory about racism appears to be at odds with what actually happened on Election Day. Consider the following facts. Twenty-nine percent of Latinos voted for Trump, per exit polls. Remarkably, despite the near-ubiquitous narrative that Trump would have deep problems with this demographic given his comments and position on immigration, this was a higher percentage of those who...

Michigan was the home of the original Reagan Democrats. Trump seems to have won there. This is a historic incident in American politics.

The eighth Congressional District of Minnesota is a working class area in Eastern Minnesota. It has voted for a Democrat in the last four Presidential elections. It has a Democrat Congressman and will likely be the most expensive Congressional race this year. Usually, a Democrat Presidential candidate would win. But a recent poll held a shock: Trump is up 12 points! And more: Trump is winning among women. And the Democrat Party is losing members. They’re becoming Independents. What The Data Says did this analysis of the Eighth Congressional District of Minnesota: – Trump is beating Hillary by 12 points:...

Laura Perrins: Working class men turn their backs on work By  Laura Perrins Something strange is going on with the working class men of America. Many in this class of men are no longer working, and it is not for the lack of jobs.As Charles Murray explains in White America – while upper middle class men (and their wives) work more and more, working-class men work less and less to such and extent that we must insert those quotes – the working class man, is now the ‘working’ class man. This phenomenon has caught the attention of the White...

They're known as some of the most inspirational businessmen in history. But the success of industry giants such as Sir Richard Branson and Lord Sugar is actually putting working-class boys off of further education. A number of high profile celebrities who have gone on to make their fortunes after dropping out of education or choosing to not go to university are inspiring young men to following in their footsteps, according to a new report.

During an era of headline-grabbing advances in medicine, the United States is experiencing a health cataclysm. The latest straw in the wind is last week’s report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that life expectancy for white women declined slightly from 2013 to 2014.

The Geography of Trumpism NEIL IRWIN and JOSH KATZ MARCH 12, 2016 When the Census Bureau asks Americans about their ancestors, some respondents don’t give a standard answer like “English” or “German.” Instead, they simply answer “American.” The places with high concentrations of these self-described Americans turn out to be the places Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has performed the strongest. This connection and others emerged in an analysis of the geography of Trumpism. To see what conditions prime a place to support Mr. Trump for the presidency, we compared hundreds of demographic and economic variables from census data, along with...

They are the children’s film characters loved by generations of fans, rich or poor, across the world. But the Seven Dwarfs, Bert the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins and others have been criticized for sending out the wrong message about poverty. Good-natured Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke, is too happy and carefree given the hardships of working-class life in Edwardian London, US researchers claim. [...] Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina looked at 32 films, many of them from Disney, that were rated G -- the American equivalent of U -- and had grossed more than $100 million...