When they see their lifestyles diminishing, they will be anxious for a change. However, they might be reticent if we shame them publically. Startegic graciousness may be the best course on this front.

The big question is whether they will wise up before it’s too late.

The Statists are at the door and the takers are beginning to outnumber the makers. With a filabuster-proof majority in Congress, the Dems could easily make felons and illegal aliens their newest constituency. Then what?

understand the gist of your post, but you seem to be saying that “fighting the rich” is somehow laudable and eventually a benefit to “the poor.” If that premise is correct, I can only say that “the rich” is not a monolithic block of people, but is constantly changing. Usually, the top fifth drops down to be replaced by the next fifth, the next fifth moves up and so on.

And usually we are talking about an AGE difference, rather than a class or color difference. It only makes common sense — older folks have been in the work world longer, have more trainning, experience, skills and credentials and therefore make more money.

And the old stereotype of a bunch of rich white guys smoking cigars on yachts is not refective of reality. People like the John Kerry and Ed Kennedy, who simply married or inherited money are the exception, not the rule. Most of the so called “rich” have been struggling, saving and delaying gratification for decades, not to mention risking everything they have and working a hundred hours a week to make their businesses grow.

Also, you said something about needing a tax write off for donations. Well, leaving aside for the nonce the fact that conservative Christians are BY FAR more generous with personal charitable donations than the Clinton-Obama crowd, the giant welfare state has made deductions necessary for anyone to survive. You may not realize it, but private donations and charities took care of the poor, however defined, in this country for 150 years before the modern concepts of public asistance took hold. No tax deductions were expected or necessary — it was considered one’s Christian duty to help the poor and since most people were in fact Christians, the poor were cared for, albeit not in the style to which they may have wished…

And the whole notion of “class warfare” was a Dem political invention whereby poor people were made to feel envious of so-called “fat cats” who were supposedly stealing someone else’s “fair share” of the pie. Of course this politically expedient scam is based on the nonsensical premise that wealth is a zero sum game, i.e. that if I gain “wealth,” that some how “takes” money out of someone else’s pocket. The economy simply doesn’t work that way.

Indeed, the whole idea that wealth is somehow “distributed” is a gross misrepresentation of reality. A “distrubution” in its’ quotidian sense is a statistical abstract used to describe a set of numbers. Numbers, representing car ownership, salaries, or cows jumping over the moon, can be shown to follow a discrete pattern, or distribution, usually on a graph, as a way to analyze and discuss trends, percentages and so forth. However, to describe wealth in general as being “distributed” implies that some great supernatural, or in this case, malevolent, force both possesses all the wealth and distributes it as well. Such an implication is nonesense with regards the free market (although Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” could be said to do just this,) but not concerning the government, which indeed does control (but not produce) money (as opposed to wealth) and does in fact distribute it, based on, usually, crass political considerations. The unenlightened therefore believe that ALL wealth is somehow “distributed” and that they, in turn, are not receiving their “fair share.” Such a belief system is likely the reason the lamestream media are constantly declaring that it is somehow “unfair” (if true at all, which I doubt) that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.

Having been poor most of my adult life, I will address the second half of your post momentarily (probably after lunch, Central Daylight Time.)

I can’t speak for other people, but I don’t really think most “poor” people are lazy. I do think that many people receiving housing subsidies, rent subsidies, food subsidies, and so on are simply making a choice many would make in the same situation. In my hometown, former housing projects are being torn down and the residents moved. The local housing authority has bought up luxury apartments in which to house them. I heard on the TV this AM that the state of Mass is actually furnishing folks on public assistance with automobiles — free and clear. Now, who would not choose to work 38 hours a week at McDonalds if one can live in a luxe apt, drive a free car, have food provided and enjoy plenty of time off?

On the other hand, I once lived in a men’s shelter. I chose not to hang around until a spot opened up on the pub housing waiting list, but rather went to work during the day and enrolled in school at night. After twenty years of 18 hour days, two and three jobs at a time, no time off, living in 600 sq ft apts and driving really old cars, I now have something to call my own — by the Grace of God. Am I better than anyone else? Not really, but I was inculcated with a work ethic early in my life and not a sense of victimhood or dependence. I now contribute to the common weal rather than take from it. And the insidious part of making an easier choice, i.e. no forebearance on babies, bling and belly, is that eventually there really is not enough to go around — precisely because the government is indeed now “distriuting” what wealth is left. In Maggie Thacther’s piquant phrase, “…eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

So, the real problem is governemt making it so much easier for people to live off the fruits of another’s labor. Which brings us to the very definition of poverty. The American usage of the term “poverty” would incite wonder (and jealoussy) in denizens of the third world — even in the second, more industrialized world. Having been in a profession which caused me to “set foot” in the projects (not to mention having friends there,) as well as working among the rural poor, and having occasion, both in the Navy and on international mission trips, to work and live in the thrid world, I can tell you that most of the world’s poor do not have things like big screen, color cable or satellite TV, microwaves, fly rides, no cost groceries, low cost housing, volunteer tutors for the children, breakfast programs, lunch programs, afterschool programs and on and on. They are poor in the sense of not having enough to eat or a roof over their heads at night.

And many of them are poor becasue there is simply no opportunity. Even in “these tough economic times,” jobs go a begging in the local paper, businesses have “Help Wanted” signs out and positions can be had. And fairly good, well paying jobs. I saw an entry level job stringing cable which paid almost as much as I make NOW — after years of sweat and sacrifice. An article in the Wash Times the other day highlighted the case of a man who “was forced” to take a poorly paid internship at a non-profit because no positions in the field of non-profits were available, even though the young man had great credentiials, including a degree in chemical engineering. It wasn’t until the end of the article that the man revealed he simply didn’t want a job in “his field,” but he wasn’t going to “settle.” Another word for that is “paycheck.” Alas, such is modern America’s perception of poverty and the alleged lack of opportunity.

Most people who grew up poor and worked to get rich have not “forgotten”
what it was like at all. What seems to bother some people is that they remember all too well. It took work, sacrifice, putting off children and so forth. And now they expect it of others. BTW, is there a sentient being this side of Pluto who does not yet realize that dropping out of HS to have children is almost always a ticket to life-long poverty and ensures very dismal prospects for the progeny of such choices?

Furthermore, I didn’t mop floors, dig ditches and swing hammers all day in the red hot Alabama sunshine because of a “Hook up Legacy system,” whatever that is. I got jobs by applying for and sticking to them until something better came along. I worked for black and white bosses alike without concern. They all wanted the same thing — a day’s work.

You’ll have to re-explain the part about people being over and/or under qualified for their jobs, I just don’t get it. After all, Einstein was a patent clerk for quite a while.

And I don’t think most conservatives mind paying taxes. What we mind is handing over half of our wages to be wasted or “distributed” to people who have not earned them. Such a perverse system is almost designed to destroy a safe and prosperous nation. And so it will if its’ apologists win the day.