Hello rjhenn,
Thanks.
-As they shed the crocodile tears of those who have the most money, both prior to and following an increase in taxing of the rich.
I mean, they don't even have their wealth reduced so much as to make anyone else richer than them, much less 'taxed into poverty.' They still hold their same position on the scale of wealth from the poorest to the richest. They just can't stand the idea of government doing more for the populace to offset the problem of how that scale of wealth has actually been changing. That's because it heavily favors those richest individuals more and more as time goes by.
The distribution of wealth from poorest to richest has been growing thinner and thinner at the low end, with a lot of people having very little as, for the very few at the high end the amount of wealth is staggering, shooting off the page. As time goes by, the low and middle get less and less as the very few at the top end get even more, so much that any graph which showed it proportionally would hardly show anything at all for the entire bottom half of the population.
If we wanted to just freeze the highly skewed current distribution of wealth where it is right now, we would have to have constantly increasing taxes on the richest just to hold us at our current level of already extreme wealth inequality.
It is difficult to imagine how, as time progresses and those proportions become increasingly skewed, eventually to the point where only a very few individuals have most of the wealth, and everyone else has practically nothing comparatively, that such resentment would
not grow that it would cause a social upheaval. That has happened already, time and again across history.
I think it is the responsibility of the people of our age to recognize that simmering problem and begin to address it now while we can make easy and slight changes which diminish no rich lifestyles, but make a great improvement in those of the lower half of the wealth spectrum. This could actually generate so much new prosperity, education, ingenuity and productivity that the economy thrives in a healthy way which generates enough taxes to end the spiraling increase of federal debt. That is an important missing factor Trump Republicans are not addressing. Ignoring that problem will not make it go away. It is a ticking time bomb.
We need a new education system in the USA. What we have is not working. We are so stupid to think if we don't spend money on education that we would not end up spending more on prison. When we resign ourselves to fix these social problems with prison, we take a potentially productive individual out of productive society and they become a burden to society. That really hurts both our economy and our debt figures. Money spent on education is worth more than money spent on prison.
If society does not provide education and opportunity for realizable success, then people get into trouble. We need to collect enough revenue to have our government provide an effective education to prepare young people to enter productive society in the profession of their choice and aptitude. The only way we can ensure that society is doing this is through our common organization called government. Capitalism has no interest in making sure young people are educated. It has to be government. All capitalism wants to do with them is extract wealth. Capitalism is quite happy to have lots of dumb people out there in society because marketing is more effective on dumb people. Smart people decide for themselves what to buy, where to spend their money. Dumb people see something, they got to have it, and they spend their last dollar to get it. Then they can't make ends meet and go bankrupt or homeless. They actually become a burden on the economy, a mistake that capitalism is too dumb to self-correct without government guiding it.
