Testing, one, two three. Is this thing on?I guess it is, it just seems rather hard to hear compared to the big Megaphones so many others have at their disposal. I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe sometimes. So we point at the rich,(one-percenters), or whatever category you wish to invent, and scream that the love of money is the root of all evil. It's very easy to point at various elements of our society and exclaim how very selfish and uncompassionate we have become. It's equally easy to look at a data set of financial information and conclude that our economic system is wholly unfair and that something sinister must be afoot. Easy, too, is the game of fixing society's ills by using other people's money. Easy, that is, if we have determined that these "other people" have come by their wealth immorally. Otherwise, we might feel like the ones stealing other people's money. It seems to me we are missing some important facts here. Or maybe we are missing an important perspective. When we look at data over time. That is, looking at certain analysis of financial concerns throughout our country, we see trends in data. We miss reality because we are focused on numbers on a page which seem to bring us to similar conclusions from one year to the next. Those stingy top one, or ten percenters just won't go away. And they are getting richer and richer by the day. What the data doesn't show, without going to look for it, is the fact that there is substantial movement from within these different categories of income earners from year to year. It's the same set of 10 digits representing the high earners so we assume it's the same people as well. This is simply not true. There are many people earning more this year than last and many earning less. The exception would be the "super-rich" whose wealth well-insulates them from short-term financial set-backs. If you listen to Dave Ramsey's program when he invites millionaires to call in it's a very educational time indeed. These millionaires have simply made smart decisions and most have built their wealth, over time, on incomes very similar to mine. These middle income jobs may be fading but they are still available and I'm not sure punishing these people's wise decision-making by taxing them more and more is a good, or even ethical, position to take. Our free-market system, when allowed to work, for instance allowing failing businesses to actually fail so that new opportunities can be leveraged and turned into profits for the remaining companies is all part of a healthy economy.
So the love of money is the root of all evil when someone else is accumulating more of it than I think they should have but my desire to have the government take their money and give it to me is somehow virtuous? I just don't get it.
