The Republican party has got to learn that you cannot build a house on a shitty foundation and expect it to stand. The (growing) poor and (shrinking) middle class are the foundation, and if their lives become one of subsistence only, they will not have the spending ability necessary to prop up our economy. This will in turn drag everyone else down, and the rich and super-rich will have no one left to buy the products that their money-making corporations produce. This is just simple logic - what happens to the least of us happens to us all.
the Republican party long ago ceased to be concerned with the poor, working, or middle classes. I have become convinced that the party that was originally founded to combat slavery, the party of Lincoln, has undergone several major transformations in its history. In the 80s it was taken over by the religious right when Reagan used blatant pandering to evangelicals to clinch the nomination. Then in 2000 with the election of Bush the neo-Cons took over. While they still paid lip service to the religious right, and still talked the whole Reagan-era "small government" audioporn, they had transformed the party yet again.
I am utterly certain that the core leadership of the GOP, the people who meet quietly behind the scenes to determine the direction, efforts, and ideology of the party have only a single goal now:
to transfer as much of the tax burden as possible off of the wealthy and corporations and onto the middle and working classes.That's their point, now. Everything they do is in some way designed to either transfer the tax burden or to distract the public from how they are transferring the tax burden. They care nothing about encroaching Muslims, or Sharia, or abortion, or gay marriage, or job creation, or any of the other issues they are screaming about. All of these things are just bugbears meant to frighten their base and distract everyone from what they are really doing. The fact that by doing this they are inevitably killing off the middle class and creating a two-tiered society with a very wealthy, privileged elite minority and a vast, dead-ended underclass of the poor doesn't matter to them, because they will be firmly in the first category.