Social Darwinism: Are The Poor Really Getting Poorer?

Last week, Obama referred to Republican Paul Ryan's budget proposal as a form of Social Darwinism. At the same time he took aim at Romney and his wealth for supporting that Ryan proposal.

Expect to hear a lot about Social Darwinism in this year's Obama reelection campaign.  It is a continuation of his class warfare attack on the 1% who are considered "rich".   To a liberal, Social Darwinism is code for conservative (Republican) activism to stop wealth redistribution so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  It's a political/social take-off on Darwin's theory that the strongest will survive and the weakest will be allowed to die; where the strong are the rich and the weak are the poor. In support of this, liberals often, superficially, point to statistics that have shown that, over the years, the rich have garnered a bigger piece of this nations wealth; when, at the same time, the poor have lost ground. But statistics can be, a lot of times, deceptive lies.  And, the lie in the poor-are-getting-poorer argument is the fact that most of this nation's poor don't stay poor.  Most all move up in class over time as is deftly explained in this video:



But, the Democrat's poor-are-getting-poorer argument is even sillier when you consider which political party has been primarily in control of Congress over the years.  Since FDR's time in office, the Democrats have dominated Congress.  When coupled with a Democrat President (FDR, LBJ, Carter, Clinton and Obama), they have managed to pass one major social and wealth redistribution program after another. Yet, despite all these programs and a near complete control of Congress over the years,  the Democrats continue to argue that the poor have only gotten poorer.  In a way, stupidly implying that their social programs have done nothing to improve the lives of the poor.

But, even the Republicans have gotten into the wealth distribution game.  Take, for example, the Bush tax cuts.  When implemented, 10 million additional lower income American's were relieved of the burden of having to pay any taxes. Then, too, people in the lowest tax bracket saw their taxes reduced by 33% from 15% to 10%.  While, at the same time, the nation's rich only got a 3.5 percentage point break in their tax burden.  However still today, the Democrats have successfully managed to label the Bush tax cuts as tax cuts for the rich.

The bottom line is that, contrary to word being put out by the Democrats, this nation's poor are better off than the poor of even 10 years ago.  Admittedly, some of this might actually be due to the Democrat's social engineering programs.  But, a lot has to do with the strength and power of the U.S. economy to create wealth at all ends of the economic spectrum.  And, when Democrats do everything possible to stymie economic growth, they actually do more harm to the poor than good; offsetting much of the benefits that the poor may have received from their so-called social programs.  Then, too, social safety nets have a tendency to lock some dependent poor into a lifetime of being poor.  This was certainly the case with Welfare until it was reformed by a joint collaboration between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton.