Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - and What We Can Do About It Book

Let's create a big government that has all the money and power and they will altruistically make sure that everyone has everything equally the same amount regardless of what value they provide, risk they take, or what they create? This is what Thom suggests. This scary platform of entitlement and "right to have" is similar to the platform that has created many corrupt historical governments who oppress (with the money and power they are given) the people who gave it to them to create a magical utopian society where no one works, and everyone gets. Oh and even worse if you don't agree with Thom then you are dumb and don't understand economics.

This is a horrible book that is damaging to our people and society. Read this if you want to become more ignorant and be insulted by having the crazy thought that people with money don't actually store it in huge Scrooge McDuck buildings and swim around in it but actually reinvest it back into the economy through lending and equity investments. Oh wait that part of economics is outside Thom's Keynesian understanding, so anyone who doesn't agree with him doesn't understand "basic economics" and the global banking system doesn't exist to provide businesses and economies with liquidity to build and create it actually hurts the economy because those rich people aren't blowing all their money to create artificial short-term demand through over consumption. Money is not stagnate or scarce and even the person who respects funds so much that they become rich because they do not blow every last dollar they have plus everything they can borrow actually creates more multiplying value (relative value per person) effect in the hands of those few then every redistributed dollar blown by the "entitled" many.

Thom actually proposes that businesses, who by the way can actually only earn money and stay in existence if they innovate and become good stewards of the funds that are entrusted to them, are "evil". He proposes that a giant government that has never in the history of ever been able to centralize planning and massively heap regulation on its people to the point that their people have a thriving middle class long term are "good". Thom never actually provides any real examples of his magical giant government that has been able to effectively take from those who create to give to those who "deserve" or are entitled to more because no government has ever done that and sustained over the long-haul. Nor does he show real evidence that any government huge regulatory power has the ability to provide any real value to the people it serves past basic enforcement of rights, freedom for its people to make their own choices (smart of dumb), safety to express those choices without violent recourse (smart or dumb), and enforcement that when people make dumb choices they need to take responsibility for it. He only gives bits and slices of self interpretive time periods of good times and compares against bad times alluding to causation that the good times came from bureaucratic liberalism policies and the bad times came from evil rich people who over guided conservatives for their own self interests. Btw Thom that's not evidence of anything just fairy tale selling and sadly too many people will grab on to fairy tales then figure out how to create more for themselves.

When I was in high school the kid who ran against me for student government had many people vote for him because he promised soda from every fountain, but even though that kid got a lot of votes (similar to the many positive reviews of this book) something for nothing does not exist in the real world (yep fairy tales). No matter how hard you think you work it doesn't matter its the long term value you provide and the magnitude of that value you provide that determines what you make and earn.

Free lunches (wealth redistribution) and entitlement societies have not been shown to work long-term from many societies before us. Even randomness can be correlated to anything so picking a "happy" time in the U.S. economy (which has so many variables) and then comparing that upward movement and saying that is a causal effect is the slight of hand that many have used to prey on others in the past. We should say no thank you to Mr. Hartmann's snake oil pitch and critically think through how it would be possible that some liberal policy or short sighted "new deal" law of the past, that has proven to be unsustainable long term in the future will somehow be magically better for everyone if we just put more money and power (regulation) in the governments hands. This book is insulting to our founding fathers and especially the connotation that the foundation they built was to create an entitled middle class that deserved guarantees and some of something someone else has because that "fair". America became a great nation and the founding fathers built this great nation on the foundation of people making their own choices and being responsible for those choices. Our history is based on free enterprise, entrepreneurs, and risk taking. Each great leap in our nation's history happened by the courage of the few who believed they were owed nothing and would create in spite of everyone who said they could not. Those few (in comparison to the numbers of everyone else) risked it all knowing that if they could create significant enough value to everyone they would be rewarded well.

Our founding fathers did not build this nation with the intention that people are entitled to a "middle class", to be good enough, a job, or some guaranteed benefit structure. If you provide the value that a company wants to give those things to you because they believe you are worth it then great but saying all are entitled to it and that an inefficient slow moving government should ensure all should have it was never their intention. Opportunity for all to have life and liberty so they could pursue happiness was what they intended. They did not intend life, liberty, and the entitlement of happiness for all.

I say to you Thom, your Dad had the middle class he did because companies at the time believed that was how to attract and retain good people. Like any good company, that would like to sustain long term, they realized that what they offered before was not sustainable, and they had to change to meet the current times. You can demand that the government force the buggy whip company to stay in business by having a bloated over taxing government regulate and give special interests offerings to keep those company's open in the short run. But you can't force people into buying a buggy whip they don't need when they have a car (that will soon drive itself) at an outrageous price to make sure that you or your grandkids have a buggy whip company pensions.

If this country wants to create a great middle class, everyone start reaching for the moon knowing that you may not reach it, but if you don't reach the moon someday (and become rich) what you will end up with is still much better than the rest of the world. People stop demanding entitlements from government and start looking for how you can provide more value or create greater innovation. Like any statistical curve, if you have a high-end "rich" and a low-end "poor" you will have a mean "middle class". If we all work to create more thinking about what I can do and not what am I entitled to, the middle class average will increase and we will see a better middle class then ever in the history of time. Heaven help us if we as nation believe that we deserve more then we have but are unwilling to do more to get it. If we believe that the good life is our right and the only way to get it is from government forced mandates on free enterprise, we like so many people before us will struggle and likely fail.

Sorry founding fathers for this book's insulting corruption on where we started as a great nation. You provided us the framework of greatness for all of us but required each of us to make it happen with promises of nothing more then we could have what we each created for ourselves.