Posted on 02/13/2004 9:26:11 AM PST by PoliSciStudent
Greetings, all! I'm new here and hope that I will not offend anyone by confessing at the outset that my personal political leanings are probably farther to the left than is the norm in this forum, but I promise, I'm not here to be disruptive or disrespectful of anyone.
I am a graduate student in political science and would honestly like to hear the views of conservative thinkers on a point which has been troubling me with respect to the direction our country is heading, namely the widening gap between rich people and poor people.
According to the US Treasury Department, the richest 2% of the country own 80% of the wealth in the US. That's honestly not just some liberal's opinion, that's really true, you can check the statistics yourself if you don't belive me. Flip that around and that means that the remaining 98% of us have only 20% to go around amongst all the rest of us. In the last three years, the income of the wealthiest .001% has increased by 600%, in other words, for every $10 million/year they were making before, they're now making $60 million/year.
I read in another article that 5 of the 12 wealthiest individuals on earth are from the Walton family which owns Wal-Mart. At the same time, human resources staff for Wal-Mart, when they hire a new employee, will routinely complete paperwork for new hires to receive foodstamps, as the wages they pay their workers are so low that, even as full-time employees, they are assured of falling below the poverty level and qualifying for foodstamps, without which they wouldn't even be able to afford to feed their families.
Does this sort of thing not bother conservatives? I've read studies which suggest that Americans by and large don't mind extremes of personal wealth as, this being the land of opportunity, we harbor some hope of one day rising to those lofty summits of affluence ourselves, so don't feel we should judge others for achieving that to which we ourselves aspire. Does that sound about right to you all? Anyone have any thoughts?
All I know is that the Walmarts around me are surrounded by mom and pop stores that are springing up like mushrooms.
Donald Trump works and has made his children work during their vacations.
Bill Gates works.
All of the Forbeses work.
The extended family Rockefeller? Yep, they all have jobs, but some of the married women don't. OTOH,many of them do charity work, raise their own children,and aren't all that different from anyone else.
All of President Bush's brothers work,as did their father before them and their grandfather.......All trustfunders.
Personally, I don't know a single trustfunder from my generation or my daughter's, who did/does NOT work, except for some of the married women.
The wealthy don't live off their investments. What century do YOU live in anyway? Stop reading books written by Edith Wharton,F.Scot Fitzgerald, or whatever " bodice rippers " you may indulge in. Who are you referring to anyway...Paris Hilton? Gee, she has a whole lot of salaried jobs.
There are no more "INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOYS"...Ali Khan and Ruberosa are dead as door nails.Taki (and even Taki works)is one of the last of the breed.
And I've got news for you, pet, I know many upper middle class men, who retired early and live off their investments. But THAT really isn't the point you're trying to make. No.........you're only a wee bit MARXIST and bitten by the green eyed monster of jealousy. It only richest of the rich, who drive you nuts. Okay, I understand it all now. But it REALLY would help your case, if you had even a glimmer of an idea what you're talking about; which you don't. :-)
Not to mention removing the incentive for many to continue to work hard at earning huge amounts of money when it is just going to be heavily penalized. I mean why should I work to provide for 3 of us when you won't even work to provide for one or why should I earn more if it is just going to mean that I qualify to have more taken from me by the government?
In reality though, for all thats said about the topic, it often gives hope to MANY people. They might not admit it, but it does.
For the guy in the ghetto who has very little, he can look out and say 'that sucks...that guy has a Benz and I have nothing'...Aside from this immediate reaction, in a longer term sense, wether admitted or not, it creates a desire and hope within that same person to change his own situation, and to know it can be done.
No .. why should it?
There will always be rich folks .. they work their butts off to start a business and watch it grow bigger and bigger to the point they can offer jobs to others
That's what so great in this country .. anyone can do this if they really want to.
Very good advice :0)
if you dangle a big enough carrot in front of me, I'd probably loot a pension fund or bilk little old ladies out of their life savings, whatever. But even though it might net me a fortune, it wouldn't necessarily be in the best interests of my community or my country. Yes, this is done so often that people have begun placing their savings in mattresses again. I don't even know how to address this, it is pure hyperbole.
the question is how much incentive does there need to be and I'm still a little unclear Yes, that's true. The "incentive" that you wonder about exists within YOU. You can have no incentive in this country and exist of the labor of your fellow citizens thanks to big brother.
We've lost some 3 million jobs in the last 3 years, that's an historical level of upheaval by any standard. Another misconception that comes from the major media. The economy (not the government) creates and loses jobs daily. This figure, while it may be accurate doesn't report the gain in jobs that occurred simultaneously. Of those 3 million jobs lost, about 2.8 million new ones were created. Anecdotally (and I'm using this to illustrate because you are augmenting your arguments with anecdote) I know a private industry corporate pilot that lost his job at the beginning of the Clinton recession. (I say Clinton because, if you're going to blame an administration for it, blame the correct one.) He was out of work for over a year. His problem was not that jobs to match his skills didn't exist, they just didn't exist in his home town. If he would have been willing to move to a major east cost city, he would have found employment within weeks, and his personal circumstances would not have prevented him from moving. If you want to cite statistics, gather ALL of them, not just the ones you believe make your point.
While I certainly do believe in rewarding individual achievement, I believe that the purpose of a national economy should be to provide the greatest good to the greatest number of the country's population. While I addressed some of this earlier (a national economy) I want to take further issue with the concept of "rewarding individual achievement." In a free market, the transactions which occur between individuals occur freely. Nobody forces me to buy Microsoft products thereby further enriching Bill Gates. But in an economy with the heavy hand of government my transactions are no longer free, the fruits of my labor are confiscated at the point of a gun. How is this fair? It is done by government officials who have implemented their policies to appease either limited constituencies or to assuage their sense of power.
Finally, I still suspect you're a Troll because you are not here for the free exchange of ideas, when you have returned to the post you don't do so to come back and discuss what you've learned, rather you go on to bring up more of the same tired old lines about wealth being in the hands of a few and the government needing to equitably redistribute it, yadda yadda yadda. Click on my name and go to my homepage and you will find many good books listed there that will help you rid yourself of this confusion you seem to have based on listening too long to the liberal mantra. I once was a mindless libbie that repeated these same lines until I educated myself on these subjects. Pick up John Stossel's book as he refutes many of your positions too.
DWMH
He could do worse.
Get off the pompous insults. I actually know people rich enough that they don't have to work for a living and they don't. And I'm not the least bit jealous of them, I don't envy their lifestyles. I have not said a single Marxist thing in here nor does it bother me that there are people that well off. Those depending on paychecks have more in common than you seem to care to believe --- without a paycheck their lifestyle will change. To me that makes more of us "middle-class" than you care to believe.
That's the problem with many of the professors --- they never left the campus environment, they never held a real world job. They don't even know what it is like for the people they lecture about, they never lived with them, worked with them.
I think we won't get an answer to any of the questions we asked this person about what he/she finds interesting about Marx or why he/she feels empowered to complain about having to pay for college.
BTW, I despise socialism, I will take my chances in a FRee Republic, win or lose.
It's good though to be concerned that the middle class stay strong --- only a strong middle class keeps us from having Marxist revolutions and the rest --- the rich and the poor don't matter --- every country, every third world country has those --- here it's the middle class that makes the difference, that makes the majority of people content.
Hell, yeah. It is what motivated me -- you have to be able to see a path to changing your lot in life. I grew up as po' white trash way out in the sticks, and decided pretty early on that there was no way I was going to settle for anything remotely like that when there are better things in the world. I didn't care what it took, I wanted out.
It turns out that it requires an extraordinary amount of effort and discipline to raise yourself above the crowd by your bootstraps. But it is definitely possible. The pain and extreme hardship required to get to where I am now is a quickly fading memory, and well worth it. I don't know why people are surprised at my very humble origins; the whole point of America is that such things are supposed to be possible, even if most don't exercise the opportunity.
Your life is not defined by what is handed to you, but by what you make of it.
I believe it goes like this: Any field that calls itself "science", isn't.
Chemistry, physics, and biology, those are science.
Social science, political science,... You get the point. :-)
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