Socialist Ocasio-Cortez Says Middle Class Doesn't Exist Anymore, Ben Shapiro Destroys Her Argument
On Tuesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the left’s newest darling and avowed democratic socialist, made an appearance on Pod Save America where she stated that the upper middle class in this country no longer exists.
As is usually the case with young socialists, Ocasio-Cortez is dead wrong. Ben Shapiro took a few precious minutes out of his day to school the new face of the Democratic Party about the truth: the upper middle class in America is the fastest-growing class and has been for decades.
Take it away, Mr. Shapiro.
Ocasio-Cortez explained that the Democratic Party had not been investing in its future. “They were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class,” she explained in fully-confident, yet completely ignorant fashion. “The upper middle class is probably more moderate but that upper middle class does not exist anymore in America.”
She then suggested that income inequality was destroying the upper middle class.
As usual, Ocasio-Cortez’s claim here simply isn’t true. The middle class is indeed shrinking — because virtually everyone in the middle class has joined the upper middle class. Between 1979 and 2014, the upper middle class has increased by 16.4%, as opposed to the poor, who decreased by 4.9%; the upper middle class constituted just over 12% of the population in 1979, but close to 30% as of 2014. As Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute explained:
Advertisement - story continues belowAny discussion of inequality that is limited to the 1% misses a lot of the picture because it ignores the large inequality between the growing upper middle class and the middle and lower middle classes.
Meanwhile, Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Kendra Bischoff of Cornell found that in 1980, 7% of Americans lived in affluent neighborhoods; by 2012, that number was 16%. And as Josh Zumbrun of The Wall Street Journal writes:
The Pew Research Center last month found that 203 metropolitan areas have seen their middle class shrink, but in 172 of those cities, the shrinkage was in part due to the growth in wealthier families.
It seems the left is so darn desperate to find a message, a cause to get behind — this is the heart and soul of the over emotional millennial generation too — that they will literally let anyone with even a basic, fundamental grasp of Marxist theory to be hailed as the Second Coming.
Ocasio-Cortez is just the latest in a long line of such individuals and the way things are going, she certainly won’t be the last.
It’s unfortunate, but the left doesn’t seem to grasp that socialism has been tried over and over again through out the ages, all with the same result: disaster.
Let’s hope they wake up before they destroy the greatest nation on earth.
Source: Daily Wire
