John Deaton and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren probably don’t agree on much, but they have both opined on the fate of the middle class as it’s seemingly squeezed out of existence.
Deaton, during a press conference held outside the Massachusetts State House on Thursday, said that just one of them has a plan to solve the problem and the other is simply spreading “misinformation” and blaming corporations.
“Sen. Warren doesn’t have a clue on how to attack the wealth gap. It has increased every single year that she has been in office,” Deaton said.
Warren’s approach to tackling income inequality is “fundamentally flawed,” Deaton said, and “confuses fighting against things as fighting for things.”
“You can spend all day long fighting against the rich and the wealthy, that’s not the same as fighting for the poor and the middle class,” Deaton said.
The senator focuses too much on tax policy, Deaton said, but that has “nothing to do with the wealth gap in this country.”
“The last 20 years, the people who have done well in this country are the people who own (expletive),” Deaton said, flanked by supporters.
In a one-on-one conversation with the Herald after his press conference, Deaton explained that the only way to fix the income inequality facing American households is to let those on the outside get in on the game, not by taking from those already on the scoreboard.
“The only people who have done well over the last two decades are the people who own things – they own stock, real estate, gold, bitcoin, whatever it is – we have to get low-wage earners access to those assets. We have to give poor people access to those appreciable assets,” he said.
Taxing the billionaires won’t make a poor person rich, he said.
“If Elon Musk pays $5 billion more in taxes, that money is not going to go into poor people’s pockets,” Deaton told the Herald. “That money goes to Ukraine, or Taiwan, or feeding migrants.”
A better policy, he said, would be helping those families invest in themselves. Deaton suggested expansion of rent-to-own programs to government housing residents, for example, and stressed the need for strong financial education.
Getting more investments into the hands of the lowest wage earners wouldn’t just help them get into the middle class, it would help the economy grow, he said.
“Our economy is two-thirds consumer spending. The ultimate goal is to put more money into the consumers pockets,” he said.
Income inequality, Deaton said, also cannot be solved by printing more cash. The level of currency currently in circulation, he said, is driving up the value of all assets and making it harder for people to find upward mobility.
In the last three decades alone, Deaton said, the amount of cash moving around the financial world has more than quadrupled, and every time there is a new crisis, the government adds more to the pot.
That may work out well for stability in the short term, and it may increase the value of assets already possessed by those who own them, but it doesn’t do anything to help the poor when the value of a home is up by over $200,000 despite not changing in any meaningful way, Deaton said.
Warren, along with our other elected leaders, are ignoring the growing national debt problem while printing money and it’s a recipe for more inequality, not less, Deaton said.
“We have to do something about the wealth gap, before we just the haves and have nots — that’s not the kind of America we want. We are really decimating the middle class,” he said.
Warren’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment by press time.