John Stossel:
President Obama says income inequality is “dangerous … the defining challenge of our time.”
The pope is upset that capitalism causes inequality.
Progressives, facing the failures of ObamaCare, are eager to change the subject to America’s “wealth gap.”
It’s true that today, the richest 1 percent of Americans own a third of America’s wealth. One percent owns 35 percent!
But I say, so what?
Progressives in the media claim that the rich get richer at the expense of the poor. But that’s a lie.
Hollywood sells the greedy-evil-capitalists-cheat-the-poor message with movies like Martin Scorsese’s new film, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which portrays stock sellers as sex-crazed criminals.
Opportunity requires allowing people to take risks and make changes.
Years before, Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” created a creepy financier, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, who smugly gloated, “It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody wins; somebody loses.”This is how the left sees the market: a zero-sum game.
If someone makes money, he took it from everyone else. The more the rich have, the less others have. It’s as if the economy is a pie that’s already on the table, waiting to be carved. The bigger the piece the rich take, the less that’s left for everyone else.
The economy is just a fight over who gets how much. But this is absurd.
Bill Gates took a huge slice of pie, but he didn’t take it from me. By starting Microsoft, he baked millions of new pies. He made the rest of the world richer, too.
Entrepreneurs create things.
Over the past few decades, the difference in wealth between the rich and poor has grown. This makes people uncomfortable. But why is it a problem if the poor didn’t get poorer? Progressives claim they did. Some cite government data that show middle class incomes remaining relatively stagnant.
But this data is misleading, too. It leaves out all government handouts, like rent subsidies and food stamps. It leaves out benefits like company-funded health insurance and pensions, which make up increasing portions of people’s pay.
And it leaves out the innovation that makes life better for both the rich and poor.
Even poor people today have access to cars, food, health care, entertainment and technology that rich people lusted for a few decades ago. Ninety percent of Americans living “below the poverty line” have smart phones, cable TV and cars. Seventy percent own two cars.
But hold on, says the left. Even if the poor reap some benefits from capitalism, it’s just not “fair” that rich people have so much more. I suppose this is true. But what exactly is “fair”?
Is it fair that models are so good-looking? Why is it fair that some men are so much bigger than I, so no one will pay me to play pro sports? It’s hardly fair that I was born in America, a country that offers me far greater opportunities than most other countries would. We Americans should be thankful that life is not fair!
Freedom isn’t fair, if fair means equal.
The very fact that today our ”poor,” especially our non-working poor have phones, medical care, housing, home heating and cooling, refrigerators, stoves, free educations is astonishing by any foreign or historical comparisons.
But giving to the non-working poor will not move them toward self-sufficiency.
Every dollar we spend to reduce the suffering of an impoverished person reduces the incentive for that person to improve his own condition by earning an income — not only because the need has become less pressing, but also because the system will in fact punish him for any success by taking the dollar away once he earns one of his own.
An NRO article today talks about this very fact.
The writer got the maximum unemployment payment for New York: $405 a week.
BUT….
The non-working poor are in the same boat with regards housing, EBT, (Food Stamps) welfare checks and more.
I have know many of them in CA who would sign up for community college classes, use the cash to buy a new wardrobe then never attend or pay for their units.
It was, to them, the best way to get money for little extras, as they called new clothes.
Getting a job was out of the question.
All I want is to be paid what I am worth for one year, then I could live quite well the rest of my life.
@Smorgasbord: What would you consider you’re worth?
My thoughts on being paid what one is worth would be proportional to how much profit he/she generates. The rule of thumb for small businesses such as auto repair, plumbers, electricians (and there are other overhead variables), etc is about a third so if you pay your auto repair shop $600 labor to replace your engine (parts excluded) and the manufacturer’s specs as well as competition dictates it to be a 10 hour job and the mechanic successfully accomplishes it in 10 hours, the mechanic is “worth” about $20 an hour ($600/10 hours= $60 per hour).
Obviously, if an employee makes their employer $10,000 an hour on a consistent bases, their “worth” is considerably more.
@Ronald J. Ward: I think Smorg’s thoughts are that he would be worth about a billion dollars. Pay him that one time, and he’s good for years. That’s likely true for many. I managed to go my whole life without drawing $1 in unemployment, thank goodness. I think that persons that go on unemployment should be required to work for the money. The longer they can sit on their butt and get paid, the longer they will. Besides that, many on unemployment are working for under the table pay. I don’t envy those people.
@Ronald J. Ward: #3
Why do you liberals always seem to take things so seriously? Learn to loosen up once in a while and have a little fun! Sometimes, things that are said JOKINGLY by a conservative are taken so SERIOUSLY by liberals. You liberals seem to always be up on your soap boxes. Climb off of it and just enjoy live sometimes.
My comment came from CB conversations I have heard when the subject was about how much a certain person was worth. I would join the conversation by saying, “All I want is to be paid what I am worth for one year, then I could quit, retire, and live quite well the rest of my life. Unlike you, the others took it as a joke and commented accordingly.
The replies were ALWAYS negative, as I expected. There was one reply I got that made me mad. It was, “I’d like to buy that guy at what he IS worth, and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth.” I fumed about it for a while, but them I figured that if you ask for something, and get what you ask for, don’t complain. I have been laughing about it ever since, and tell the story each time the situation is appropriate, and I still laugh about it.
Another way I had fun on the CB and didn’t like what I got, even though I asked for it, was when drivers would be talking about how fast their trucks would go. I would say, “All I want is to drive a truck that would do my IQ.” I expected the replies to be low numbers, and they were. There was a trucking company that paid their drivers to drive 55, and the reply was usually that I should drive for them. One driver said I would have to drive on the shoulder, but the one that heart my feelings said, “You’d be driving backwards.” I didn’t think it was funny. I stewed about that reply for a while before I, again, realized that I got what I asked for, and have laughed about if ever since.
Why is it liberals can only laugh at others, and not themselves. If a person can’t laugh at themselves, they shouldn’t laugh at others. I like to laugh WITH people, not at them. If there is one person in a group not laughing at a joke, then the joke isn’t funny to me either.
I’m never going to be paid what I think I am worth. IT WAS A JOKE.
@Redteam: #4
I forget where it was, but one welfare agency had a policy that a person had to take one of the open jobs to get welfare. Many of the ones who went on welfare figured that if they have to WORK for their money, they would work for better pay, and they got off welfare. The welfare workers realized that if enough of them got off welfare, the welfare workers would lose their jobs, so they sued, saying the recipients can’t be made to work for their welfare check, and they won. There needs to be a law saying that welfare workers won’t lose their jobs because they got people off of welfare.
In the trucking industry, lumpers are people who are paid to hand load or unload a trailer. They are paid cash, and don’t pay ANY taxes on the money they earned. There are a few companies who mandate that the lumpers are working legally, but not very many.
I was at a loading dock one time and heard one lumper talking to another lumber about his welfare check. Lumpers can earn $1,000 or more per day if they are aggressive, but they still qualify for welfare, because they don’t report that income.
Using a flat tax, or any other taxing system, won’t catch the people who are paid cash, but the Fair Tax will.
@SmorgasbordYou know: Smorg I feel it’s the Conservatives that are uptight and take everything too damn seriously. Specially here at F,A,—Every one should lighten up–life’s too short.
@Ronald J. Ward:
Then Obama and Congress are inversely, deeply in arrears for their deficit spending. As would be the vast majority of government workers.
@Richard Wheeler:
I don’t think you believe that. You read my exchanges with Joe?