Posted on 04/30/2007 3:43:40 PM PDT by aft_lizard
Today a teacher said that the rich are getting richer. I replied that it really doesn't matter how rich the rich get what really matters is everybody underneath. If the rich get richer yet the poor and middle classes wealth increases also, even though its at a slower pace than the only important stat is that the middle classes and poor got richer. I also told her that the rich doesnt effect me because it is me and the rest of the middle class that really drives prices overall because we are the ones that are doing the majority of the shopping at grocery stores and durable goods. I personally feel it is disingenuous for anybody to say that the rich getting richer is necessarilly a bad thing.
Ditto for the poor, but in reverse.
My aunt is a super lib, primarily because she has a tremendous amount of guilt over being successful and fairly wealthy while others "have so little". I remember several years ago she was very opposed to eliminating the death tax for reasons I am sure you know.
Having done a good bit of financial work for them I know a good deal about their finances and amount of their wealth. I asked her how her two daughters, who were in college at the time would come up with the more than $1 million in taxes they would have to pay if her and her husband died in a car accident tomorrow.
She thought I was crazy that she and her husband would be subject to the "death tax". After all, that is only for the RICH!
Like the AMT, which was implemented to make 155 people who didn't pay taxes one year pay taxes after that. Now we are looking at it snaring 20 million+ middle class families.
The lesson, anytime the liberals institute something to "get the rich", it will in quick order get you!
I prefer, "Why don't we feed the homeless to the hungry?"
Your history teacher has a very narrow view of life. If you look at the whole world, all Americans are “rich”. Almost all of us have access to safe water and sewage systems. Our food problem is obesity, not starvation. Almost all of us have electricity, telephones, tvs and cars.
Even the American people who depend on the generosity of others have these things.
Ask your teacher why Americans who don’t work deserve these things while people in other countries can’t get them.
They're either talking pesos, not dollars, or they are smokin some good stuph. If PhD's were making even a quarter of that, I'd be back in grad school tomorrow.
“Now I am old and retired, my daughter wants a big wedding, and pretty soon I will be back to being poor. :)”
I could always elope, if that’s what you want ...
:-P
Think of all the wealth - meaning, to my mind anyway, the more convenient lifestyles we lead thanks to technological advances - that exists today. If economics is a zero-sum game, then why in the past were so many (actually, probably everyone) poor compared to so many today? If that were how an economy worked, wouldn't someone have to have been hiding away some great wealth, to balance out the poverty (as we'd call it today) of all the others?
Obviously, then, there is a general growth of wealth - and anyone who gets alarmed over one person or group getting wealthier at a faster rate than everyone else (esp. in the USA!) just doesn't seriously know or understand this fact.
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