HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher argued that Socialism created America’s thriving middle class on Friday.

While Maher admitted that the middle class is struggling, he criticized Republicans for talking about middle class struggles because “up until like Thursday, the Republican answer to that was always just to say ‘well, that’s the new normal.'” And “yeah, those damn Democrats, always fighting the Republican Party’s efforts to stick up for the little guy. Wow, there is no shame in the Republican game, this is the party that used to like to say ‘a rising tide lifts all boats,’ which is easy to say when you’re on the yacht.”

Maher then argued “so what’s happening is, the Democrats are proposing to nibble around the edges of our middle-class problem, and the Republicans are pretending to care while they go back to servicing eight rich d*ckheads who own coal mines, and no one is telling the truth, which is that the large, thriving middle class that America used to have didn’t just appear out of the blue. It was created, using an economic tool called Socialism. I know, we never use that term here in buzzword nation, but that is exactly what our government did after World War II, it taxed the rich up to 90%, and massively redistributed that money through the GI Bill so that more than half the population benefited from free college, free job training, cheap mortgages, and much, much more. Yes, for a brief, shining moment, we were Finland. Now, we can debate whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing to go back to, but what is beyond debate is that that is what happened, the 50’s and 60’s are the era of Socialism in America.”

He continued “a middle class is actually not the normal byproduct of capitalism. Ask any historian, a middle class is actually a fluke in history, like in the 14th century, a middle class was created in Europe when, during the Black Plague, a third of the population died.”

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