Underfunding education, not funding children's healthcare, and removing the charitable tax deduction are only a few examples of how a despot achieves their goal of creating a new underclass for the benefit of corporations. Think about it and how it has happened in our past.
People desperate to escape the cruel and inhospitable conditions in Great Britain willingly signed on to become indentured servants as a means of obtaining passage to the colonies in America. These
contracts were usually for seven years on average, but this could be extended, against their will, for punishment.
They weren't slaves, they did have some rights, but they were "owned" just the same, and they were desperate for work, and a means to make any kind of living. It was an act of desperation brought on by war in Europe and loss of employment. The will had been wrung out of these people who would agree to any type of work.
The British, to keep tenant farmers working their lands and increasing their coffers, passed rules raising the price of passage, hoping to discourage sending people to the Colonies. These laws may have bitten into the lucrative trade of selling indentured servants' work to third parties.
Fast forward to the 21st Century in the USA. A spate of executive orders and appointments is steadily eroding our protections. On the chopping block are natural resources and parks, our legal protections against usurious companies, gerrymandering to remove voting rights, jailing for petty offenses with high bails, removal of access to higher education, the selling off of our infrastructure to corporations and our schools to the wealthy.
How many more examples do you need to begin to see a pattern here?
If "Make America Great Again" means anything it means that workers in Asia are demanding higher wages and better working conditions so corporations will prepare a new workplace, one of desperation. Machines are more expensive than humans who can easily be dismissed at will without healthcare and then left to die in miserable conditions.
Remove all safety, or most of it, in factories and fields, and your injury and death are yours with no recourse for legal compensation because law removes it.
Deny people the right to unionize, deny the right to anything but a pitiable means of arbitration for damages and pull out the right to class action suits and insure that corporations use their muscle to influence laws and what do you have? You have a new class of not indentured servants but an underclass that now includes everyone, not just African-Americans or poor whites but everyone without substantial wealth to support their efforts.
The British denied Irish Catholics the right to learn to read and write, and they did it to keep them as their underclass as their tenant farmers, denying them the right to buy the land, too. Tons of food grown or raised in Ireland left the island while the Irish tenant farmers died of starvation. The money was coming in while the coffin industry flourished. It was bigotry in the service of wealth, and we can see it happening here, too. Look at the devastation in Puerto Rico and Haiti. What is being done there? Is it yet another opportunity for the real estate sharks to come in, scoop up the land and create havens for the rich? People are dying without food, water or shelter and what is being done?
Impoverished children with poor or little schooling have no idea what they might be capable of doing in the future. I just saw a post where the computers in children's classes were removed because "they were too old to use." Are old computers better than no computers?
Lack of access to technology insures that children and out-of-work workers will be left with only the power of their backs to support them. Removing net neutrality is yet another step in increasing the size of the underclass in America. Lack of access to information means an inability to make informed decisions and to manipulate votes and people.
Raping our natural wonders in the service of what, oil? Who doesn't know that both oil and coal's future is doomed and that these jobs last only months, not a lifetime? Even Saudi Arabia, a country that built its fortune on oil, sees that isn't its future.
Coal has become the bane of both China and India where the thick smog it creates has made life unbearable. Both countries will move to newer sources of energy; wind and sun. But "coal is king" has been the battle cry in Kentucky where miners are dying of black lung disease thanks to years of working in coal dust. Coal isn't coming back, and the administration knows it.
Is your idea of a better future for the young of this country or for yourself the specter of becoming one of the new underclasses? I don't think so.