Obama's middle class economics at work: Middle class adults outnumbered by upper and lower classes for the first time in 2015

Pew reports here:

80.0 million middle income vs. 51.6 million lower and upper income in 1971, but 120.8 million middle income vs. 121.3 million lower and upper income in 2015.

The middle still outnumbered the lower and the upper by 3 million in 2011, but not anymore. This is what Obama meant by "Forward!" in 2012. Reducing the size of the middle class is the long-stated objective of the communists.

"[T]he lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. ... Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods."

-- Bela Kun

As for all good Marxists, Thomas Piketty's biggest problem is eliminating the middle class

From The Wall Street Journal here:

While America's corporate executives are his special bête noire, Mr. Piketty is also deeply troubled by the tens of millions of working people—a group he disparagingly calls "petits rentiers"—whose income puts them nowhere near the "one percent" but who still have savings, retirement accounts and other assets. That this very large demographic group will get larger, grow wealthier and pass on assets via inheritance is "a fairly disturbing form of inequality." He laments that it is difficult to "correct" because it involves a broad segment of the population, not a small elite that is easily demonized.

So what is to be done? Mr. Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at "$500,000 or $1 million." This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply "to put an end to such incomes." It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop "the meager US social state." There must be an annual wealth tax as high as 10% on the largest fortunes and a one-time assessment as high as 20% on much lower levels of existing wealth. He breezily assures us that none of this would reduce economic growth, productivity, entrepreneurship or innovation.

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"[T]he lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution."

-- Bela Kun, 1918

Contempt For The Middle Class Was Standard Communist Fare In The 1920s, But Noemie Emery Never Mentions It

Here, in "Obama's polls fall as middle class gets his number":

Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose latest book, The Revolt Against The Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, explains all you wanted to know about Obama, and much else. ... Siegel points to an alternative point of dissension: a contempt for the middle class, for commerce, and thus for most of the American culture, that predated the New Deal by more than a decade, and poisons our waters today. From this angle, the road to perdition (and/or Obama) was paved around 1920, when the best and the brightest, depressed by the Great War and the funk that came after, decided all was not well in the world and the nation, and the great middle class was to blame.

The progressives of the 1920s drank deeply from the well of Marxist disdain for the middle class and drew inspiration from it, for example from the likes of Bela Kun writing in Pravda, May 4, 1918, here, in "Marx and the Middle Classes":

“The internal enemy” of the proletarian Russian Revolution is constituted first and foremost by the lower middle classes. ... [T]hough the representatives of various shades of lower middle-class Socialism are constantly referring to Marx, in reality there is no greater sacrilege than this. ... The lower middle-class is not fit to wield power, and a long government by it is unthinkable. ... [T]he lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. ... [T]he lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.

Given Obama's early and deep appreciation of Marxism through the influence of people like Frank Marshall Davis, the pussy-footing around of people like Noemie Emery has gotten more than a little annoying at this late stage of the game. Obama is nothing more than a Trojan Horse trying to bring this communist vision into the present disguised as helping the middle class when what he really wants to do is wipe it out. He's off to a good start.

The black Florida Republican recently investigated by the Secret Service for suggesting Obama should be arrested, tried and hung as a traitor may be more right than he knows.

Obama Is Eliminating The Middle Class, But Do You Know Why?

Based on how thorough-going are Obama's attacks on the middle class, I'd say it's all intentional, something the professor would not dare say if he wants to keep his career, so I'll say it for him since I don't have a career to save.

Summarized from an op-ed by Peter Morici, University of Maryland, here:

His immigration policy swells the ranks of visa-holders in skill-short areas like engineering as well as the ranks of semi-skilled immigrant workers, frustrating the middle-class aspirations of the working poor born in this country.

His massive expansion of student loans permits universities to jack up tuition . . . Students are graduating encumbered by massive debt and too few marketable skills. Broke and unemployed, they are not marrying and starting families—that shrinks the middle class. 

Despite the availability of loans, skyrocketing tuition mandates ever greater family contributions to finance college. This puts higher education further out of reach for many working class families, and fewer low income children are pursuing post-secondary education than in the past—that shrinks the middle class too.

The President has jacked up taxes on families earning more than $250,000. Unfortunately, most businesses in America are either proprietorships or pass through corporations that pay those higher individual, as opposed to corporate, tax rates, raising the cost of investing and expanding businesses—that spells fewer jobs for the middle class and those that aspire to its ranks.

Unable to push through Congress limits on CO2 emissions, President Obama has used executive orders and the EPA to impose limits by fiat. Unfortunately, those raise manufacturing costs, China has no such limits, and all this encourages business to outsource in China—again fewer jobs for the middle class and aspiring middle class.

Free trade agreements that permit trading partners to undervalue their currencies, subsidize exports and artificially under price their products on U.S. store shelves, health care mandates that raise the price of insuring employees instead of controlling costs, unnecessarily cumbersome regulations to run factories, mindless limits on developing U.S. oil reserves, and exporting abundant natural gas to countries that shut out U.S. products with high tariffs all encourage outsourcing, not just in manufacturing but for many supporting services too—yet again, fewer jobs for middle class Americans.

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“The lower middle-class,” in Marx’s words, “has no special class interests. Its liberation does not entail a break with the system of private property. Being unfitted for an independent part in the class struggle, it considers every decisive class struggle a blow at the community. The conditions of his own personal freedom, which do not entail a departure from the system of private property, are, in the eyes of the member of the lower middle-class, those under which the whole of society can be saved.”

And this is the very reason why the lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They represent a very strong section of society. Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods.

The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order. ...

[Marx] wished to separate the Labour movement from all lower middle class elements, because the lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.

-- Bela Kun, Pravda, May 4, 1918 (Marxists Internet Archive, here)