Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., made her pitch to Lena Dunham’s devoted Lenny Letter subscribers on Tuesday, dramatically proclaiming that President Trump “is poised to deliver the knockout blow to our middle class.”
In a 1,300-word essay chronicling her ascent from the middle class to Congress, Warren celebrated the progressive taxation system implemented from 1935 to 1980 in an effort to make the case for greater government efforts to reduce the cost of college. “Progressive taxation gave us a chance to invest in education, infrastructure, and basic research, and careful regulation meant we could level the playing field, creating opportunities for a lot of families — including mine,” she wrote. “These progressive policies worked, and our country built the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.”
“Then came 1980,” said Warren.
“It was a turning point where we began to follow a very different approach. Ronald Reagan was elected president and, piece by piece, the policies in Washington, D.C., took a sharp turn,” the Massachusetts senator claimed. “Taxes were slashed for those at the top, and investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research shrank.”
Alluding to the new “resistance” movement, Warren concluded her message to Dunham’s audience of young feminists by declaring, “up against our army, [Trump] doesn’t stand a chance.”
But up against their “army,” Trump already defeated Hillary Clinton.
Also problematic for Warren is her contention that fiscally conservative policies implemented by presidential administrations such as President Ronald Reagan’s destroyed the middle class.
As conservative historian Lee Edwards pointed out, “Following the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, unemployment in the succeeding years fell an estimated 45 percent. During the ’80s, the consumer price index rose only 17 percent, private domestic investment grew 77 percent, and economic growth averaged 4.6 percent annually. The real income of every stratum of Americans increased, and total tax collections rose from $500 billion in 1980 to $1 trillion in 1990 (in constant dollars).”
“Perhaps most important of all,” Edwards continued, “he created IRAs (individual retirement accounts) and 401(k) programs, giving birth to what has been called ‘the investor class.’ New industries arose in computing, software, communications, and the Internet that streamlined and transformed the American economy.”
Dinesh D’Souza crunched the numbers in his 1999 biography of Reagan, writing, “As for the middle class, Reagan’s critics are quite right that this group became measurably smaller during the 1980’s. … Yet their plight is a cause for celebration, not alarm. The reason is that during the Reagan era, a substantial number of middle-class Americans became rich. They moved up rather than down. The percentage of families earning more than $50,000 in 1990 dollars rose by 5 points from 30.9 percent to nearly 35.9 percent.”
“During the 1980s, millions of middle-class Americans disappeared into the ranks of the affluent,” D’Souza observed.
Like her fellow academics — those professors tasked with providing balanced and accurate educations to the same types of impressionable young people who subscribe to Lenny Letter — Warren is using her platform to poison the next generation against fiscally-responsible governance.
Referring to recent college graduates, Warren wrote in Lenny, “Those who do make it through college are often so swamped with debt that they begin their adult lives in a deep financial hole.”
A deep financial hole.
She’s absolutely right. But where is Warren’s concern for the “deep financial hole” in which our country finds itself?
Like students taking their first steps into adulthood, the country is, indeed, “swamped with debt.” Warren should extend her concerns to the share of our country’s debt that today’s graduates will be burdened with in the future, rather than hawking policies that will only increase that burden as time passes.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
