Nine out of ten Americans have fallen behind financially as the well-to-do – especially the ultra-wealthy – capture an ever-increasing chunk of our national income. This inequality threatens the entire economy’s future growth and stability. But whenever someone offers a solution to this growing problem, someone else on the right is likely to accuse them of “class war.”

Class war is precisely what we’ve been seeing for decades now – but it’s been waged for, not against, the wealthy. And Republicans have been its dutiful servants from the start. It might make a good hashtag, come to think of it: #RepublicanClassWar.

The wreckage of this war can be seen all around us. Incomes for the top 1 percent of households have more than doubled since the 1980s. The top 0.1 percent has increased its share of this nation’s total wealth from 7 percent in 1978 to 22 percent in 2012, a level not seen since before the Great Depression. Ninety percent of American households saw no increase in their wealth after 1986.

There’s a war on – but the middle class didn’t start it.

Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee opened up a new front in that war today by targeting disabled Social Security recipients. They didn’t say they were conducting a class war, of course. Instead, they claimed that they were concerned about the future financial stability of the Social Security disability program. They’re expressing that concern by blocking an adjustment between trust funds that would restore it to financial health, something previous Congresses have done 11 times in the past.

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