John Cole highlights the following Washington Post article (below) and ends with the comment: “The most amazing thing the Republican party has done is turn the people they are screwing the most into their most ardent supporters.” 

He’s right. It’s like an abusive relationship. The base won’t leave their abusers (the Republican candidates and politicians who are screwing them over) because they looove them.

They’d rather be Tammy Wynette than agree, even a little, with the evil socialists who say maybe the wealthy don’t need MORE tax cuts at the expense of programs and services the rest of us depend on — and maybe the richest don’t need MORE of the nation’s wealth that’s been steadily distributed to them for the past 30 years.

Here’s that article. Kiss the middle-class goodbye:

Many in U.S. slip from middle class, study finds

Nearly one in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Downward mobility is most common among middle-class people who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs, the report says.

“A middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime,” the report says.

The study focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars.

People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents. The findings do not cover the difficult times that the nation has endured since 2007.

Pew researchers said the study’s structure did not permit an analysis of whether upward mobility has become more difficult through the years. Nonetheless, some economists point to growing income inequality and widely stagnating wages as evidence that the American Dream is slipping out of reach for many people.

You know which GOP presidential candidate is most anxious to pull the plug on the middle-class? All of them, but these 3 have spelled it out most recently:

Mitt Romney: He’d deliver a massive $6.6 trillion tax cut that would primarily benefit the very wealthy and corporations. After accounting for the added interest costs that we’ll have to pay, the total cost of Romney’s plan grows to $7.8 trillion over the next 10 years. Romney lays out several tax policies, all of which primarily benefit the super wealthy: extend Bush’s tax cuts, eliminate capital gains taxes, cut corporate taxes, and eliminate estate taxes. Read on.

Michele Bachmann: She’d like to end corporate income tax. Bachmann has previously called for cutting the 35 percent corporate tax rate down to nine percent, a move that would cost more than $2 trillion over ten years. This call for reducing or even eliminating corporate taxes comes at a time when corporate after tax profits are the highest they’ve been since 1947. She’d also like to give a second ‘one-time’ tax holiday to corporations who want to bring money back to the U.S. to create jobs. Even though corporations didn’t do that with the extra money the first time. Read on.

Jon Huntsman: He released an economic plan that is as bad for the middle-class — and as nutty — as any proposed by his rivals. It would pay for a half-million-dollar tax break for the richest 0.1 percent of Americans with tax increases on the middle-class and new taxes on seniors, veterans, and poor families. [...] on the whole, middle-class families would be forced to pay $1,890 in higher taxes under the no-tax expenditure plan compared to what they pay now. The richest one percent, meanwhile, would get an average tax cut of more than $7,000, because they benefit the most from the lower rates. Read on.

And here’s the abusive relationship between the Republican party and the supporters, illustrated…