Tuesday, August 13, 2013

It's Santorum Again. He's Back.

Rick Santorum is not a classy guy.   In fact, he denounces the term "middle class" as Marxist.   Here's what he told an audience in Iowa:

"Don't use the term the other side uses. Who does Barack Obama talk about all the time? The middle class. Since when in America do we have classes? Since when in America are people stuck in areas or defined places called a class? That’s Marxism talk."

The Daily Kos' Laura Clawson answers Santorum's question.

Since when in America do we have classes? Aside from "since always"? (After all, when this country was founded, in most places only property-owning white men could vote.) Maybe since this is a country where the richest kids with the lowest test scores are more likely to finish college than the poorest kids with the highest test scores. Since in large chunks of the country, there's a less than five percent chance that a child raised in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will rise to the top fifth, and almost nowhere is there more than a 20 percent chance it will happen. Since 50 percent of Americans had just 1.1 percent of the total net worth in 2010, down from 3 percent in 1989. That sure looks like America has classes, like people are "stuck in areas or defined places," whether or not we call those areas classes. 

Touche, Laura.   Well done.

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