Rich!

Rich people, not all rich people, but a lot of them, believe that poor people get what they deserve. They are poor because they are lazy, or stupid, or not deserving of money. Why should they help poor people when they won’t even help themselves? I guess it is what they tell themselves to make themselves feel better sitting in one of their three homes, while vast numbers of homeless people wander the streets in search of a place to stay dry. Yeah, those bad homeless people deserve what they get. Now, shall we vacation in Venice or Tahiti this month?

Many rich people believe that homeless people are homeless by choice. Really? Have you ever talked to one? Of course you haven’t. Why would you do that? You never even see them. The champion of these rich folk is Ronald Reagan. Of course he is. He made them richer. Reagan and his congress said it was unfair to tax rich people for 70% of their income. They reformed the tax code and cut that top tax bracket way back. I remember. Even I thought it was unfair that rich people should have to pay so much in taxes. Cutting back the top tax bracket made sense to me then. It doesn’t anymore, not when you see what has happened in the last 40 years. To pay for their tax policies, they cut social programs, in particular, housing subsidies. We didn’t have homelessness before Reagan. I mean, sure there have always been a few who choose the hobo life, and there was the occasional individual to whom circumstances dealt an unfortunate blow. But after Reagan, for the first time since the Great Depression, we not only saw masses of homeless people, we saw homeless families. And that legacy has lasted till today. It has become normalized.

It is not helped by the fact that rich people keep getting more tax breaks, so they keep buying a second, third, fourth, fifth home or condo. We hear people complaining about gentrification, and what that really means is tearing down poor people’s housing and putting rich people’s housing in its place. The only building going on is high-end stuff, because that is where the realtors and the developers and the contractors can make the most money. No wonder the rest of us have difficulty finding a home or even and apartment that we can afford. Again, I am not talking about all rich people. Some actually have morals and care about their fellow humans. They even support policies that are a detriment to their own personal wealth, if it benefits society as a whole. Unfortunately there are too many of the other kind.

The rich get richer and the poor . . . stay poor . . .

There is a small minority of the rich who started out with nothing, and through hard work, intelligence, perseverance, and a bit of luck, built their business or their ideas up to make their fortune. To those I say, bravo. But the majority of rich people are rich because their parents were rich. The fact of the matter is, if you start out with money, it is easy to make more money. If you don’t have money, it is really hard to make money. There are so many opportunities available to rich people: the stock market, real estate, bonds, and business investments. These things just aren’t available to poor people or even the lower middle class. The lower half of the population struggle to scrape up enough to put money into a savings account that makes maybe a half a percent interest. Before the Reagan tax cuts there was more parity in America. CEO’s didn’t make 40 million dollars a year while their line workers made minimum wage. NBA players and movie stars didn’t make more money than they could spend in a lifetime. Giving tax breaks to the rich and corporations has not “trickled down” to the workers like they said it would. In fact, the opposite has occurred. It used to be possible for one parent to be the breadwinner and the other to stay home and take care of the kids. That is no longer possible. I realize that both parents may want to work, and that is fine. The problem is, they no longer have a choice. In today’s world both parents have to work . . . unless you are rich.

In the movie Wall Street Gordon Gekko says, “greed . . . is good.” Spoken like a rich man. Greed is not by any stretch of the imagination, good. Greed destroys the environment. Greed corrupts our political leaders. Greed wrecks families. Greed fuels selfishness. Greed destroys our health care system, Greed has been leading the downward spiral that America has been on for the past 40 years.

It is made more exasperating when many of these rich people consider themselves Christians. Really? Jesus had some very specific things to say about how we should treat each other. He also had some VERY specific things to say about rich people. Something about the love of money being the root of all evil, and something about how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle that it is for a rich man to go to heaven. One can see why.

Star Liner