It occurs to me there's a chicken and egg problem here. Are they responding to existing sentiment of despair and lack of opportunity or fomenting it themselves?
People who can make their own way don't vote for garbage like this, but people who believe they are helpless do. It would seem to be an incentive to some to not only destroy anyone's belief in self sufficiency but also actually destroy the economic engines which allow it.
In other words, are they creating the despair and economic destruction they claim to be fighting?
This is a long discussion. I think of synthetic extraction and monetization. Politicians only have one tool in their toolbox: taxing. That's it. This is why the only lever they pull is to raise taxes. They can't unwind the enormous infrastructure they built to orchestrate the taxing, so they must continue adding newer layers.
They now have a doom-loop and it's accelerating: high taxes causes the wealthy and productive to flee. The people who can't flee are trapped.
Look at Baltimore.