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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

> Good luck convincing Trump about any of it, though.

s/Trump/conservatives/

Conservatives (even poor conservatives) seem to be against wealth redistribution of this nature and try to label it as "welfare" and "handouts", which they find distasteful, even when it's the healthiest thing for the economy as a whole. They can't seem to get past the idea that "hard work = wealth", and that giving people breaks is morally bankrupt. They seem to think that all this is a zero-sum game, and that giving aid to the lowest-income people will necessarily take something away from them.

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Which I don't get because they seem to be in favor of "handouts" (tax cuts, bailouts, etc.) for the richest of the rich thinking that will drive the economy.

Agreed. People conveniently forget that a producer-only economy doesn't work. If consumers don't have the financial ability to consume, you're screwed.

The reason our economy is working now is because of the huge amount of speculation that fuels the investment sector. Wealth creation is no longer predicated on how much stuff is being sold, just on how much people bet will be sold.

> > Good luck convincing Trump about any of it, though.

> s/Trump/conservatives/

Just to be clear

s/conservatives/corporate politicians/

which sadly comprises the majority of our current Rep and Dem congressmen.

Sure, but those politicians continue to be supported by their constituents, many of whom are poor and vote directly against their self interest.

I'm not going to claim that the Democratic party has no problems, but at least they tend to support social-support programs. Republicans work to cut funding for them whenever they're in power.

In my opinion, the first problem that we as a nation need to solve is the equality of the vote, there are two steps to solve this:

1. Get money out of politics by moving over to publicly funded elections

2. Re-implementing a number of regulations on media companies that the Clinton administration rolled back

(I'm not certain which order they can be accomplished in)

It's my hope that once these are done then we'll be able to tackle issues more fairly and break down the stupid partisan walls.

More often than not, it also gets labeled “communism”, and effectively kills any potential for meaningful discussion and debate.

Rich people have done an absolutely astounding job of convincing poor conservatives that this nonsense makes sense.

> Rich people have done an absolutely astounding job of convincing poor conservatives that this nonsense makes sense.

I don't know why this was down voted, the process of slowly rephrasing the meaning of the American dream to mean "let's let a select few get super wealthy" from "working together everyone can become rich" is one of the biggest marketing scams in recent history.

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