Warren: Washington Turned Its Back On The Middle Class

On the Thursday edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Sen. Elizabeth Warren detailed the chronology of the middle class economic crisis, including Washington’s malign negligence, bringing a much-needed populist economic perspective to understanding how we got where we got.

Maddow welcomed Warren to the show and asked her why people in Washington are so dead set against talk of expanding Social Security.

Warren replied that it’s because the interests of the middle and working classes have been off the table in Washington for a generation.

“Adjusted for inflation,” she said, “the wages for a middle class family have gone down” for decades, and yet basic costs of living have all increased. Housing, energy and food prices have all increased steadily during that same period of time.

“Families cut back as best they could,” Warren said. “They sent two people into the work-force if they had a two-person household.”

And yet, she said, they have found that they still can’t get by.

“So they stopped saving and went into debt,” she continued. “And now as they’re starting to hit their retirement years, what we’re seeing is seniors who are really in a financial squeeze.”

Now, she said, there are fewer workers with pension plans and other workers who thought they had pension plans are seeing those monies raided and confiscated by Wall Street hedge funds.

All many of these people have, Warren said, is Social Security. “This is no time — this is the last time we should be talking about cutting Social Security.”

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.