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The Rise Of The Middle Class

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For decades now, our political and economic policy have been constructed around one idea: that if taxes on the rich go up, job creation will go down. This idea has been the backbone of Republican trickle-down Reagan-economics and has been scarcely challenged by Democrats. America’s economy as well as the global economy as a whole are facing extreme income inequality and this idea has only widened the gap. Our political system has been flooded with the money of the rich through lobbyists or super PACs, who then are the ones receiving the tax cuts and are garnering political favors by doing so, effectively moving us farther from a free and fair democracy, but rather towards oligarchy. The middle class has been fading away due to stagnating…show more content…
Hanauer begins his argument by comparing the fallacy on hand to another fallacy we once believed, which turned out to be dead wrong: “For thousands of years people were sure that earth was at the center of the universe. It’s not and an astronomer who still believed it was, would do some lousy astronomy.” In doing this, Hanauer seeks to bring out the “duh!” response out of people and relate it back to the argument at hand. The argument being that if a policy maker who believed that the rich and businesses are “job creators” and therefore should not be taxed, would make policy equally as lousy. Although he incites the emotional response in the reader he also backs it up with facts and his experience as one of the plutocrats. He cites his experience as well as,going into some basic economic theory: “I have started or helped start, dozens of business and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would have all failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.” He uses this to pivot to his next point, which is the main point of the argument: “That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small.” He backs it up with his theory, which is a basic economic principle of demand when broken down: “What does lead to more employment is a ‘circle of life’ like feedback loop between customers and business.” Not only is it not the rich who create
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