Rising Tide of the Wealthy Swamping Boats

In 1980, then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan gave a speech to reassure skeptical Americans that the conservative movement of those times was NOT going to return to the "survival of the fittest," "dog-eat-dog" capitalism of earlier times, and he said, "a rising tide lifts all boats," and "we won't leave anyone behind." Well, after more than thirty years of prevailing conservative economic philosophy, we've found out the only rising tide has been for the very wealthiest Americans, who didn't need help in the first place, and that the boats of other Americans are being swamped by the rising tide of the wealthy. The boats of the American middle class are sinking, if they haven't already sunk. Reagan began with big tax cuts (for those times) for just about everyone, but tilted toward the wealthy, a conservative feature which has only grown in scope, as later, the tax cuts of George W. Bush were more than tilted toward the rich, they were an avalanche. It doesn't stop there, folks. The wealthy, or more likely their financial advisers and hedge funds, often plow that money into commodities; you know, like oil and gasoline, and many food products, driving up prices, and drawing money out of your pockets and into their investment accounts, keeping the cycle going. When you have the likes of Warren Buffett, one of the world's richest men, telling us to " stop coddling the rich," you better "take that to the bank" yourself! There are other wealthy Americans sounding the alarm, too. To my knowledge, Buffett is a Republican, as I saw a clip the other day where he mentioned having been president of the College Republicans in his younger days. Of course, that may have been when progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt was President...ah....just kidding Warren. Today's Republican leaders have virtually nothing in common with Teddy, aka, "the Trust Buster," and might prefer to be known collectively as "the Trust Builders." Just this summer, Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, Jr. of California told a conservative group that Ronald Reagan was too moderate and could not be elected today. Watch out Americans! Your boat might just get swamped next!

WORD HISTORY:
More-This word goes back to Indo European "meis," which had the notion of "big, large, great." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "maiz(on)," which was used as a comparative; that is, "larger, bigger;" thus, "more." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "ma" (long "a") and "mara" (first "a" long) meaning "more" (it is closely related to "most."). Later it became "mare," not the horse, and again, the "a" was long, before the modern spelling/pronunciation. Common in the other Germanic languages: German has "mehr," Low German has "mea/mear," West Frisian has "mear," Dutch has "meer," Icelandic has "meiri," Danish, Swedish and Norwegian have "mer."