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why is it that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? I am 58 years old and I have never owned a home. I am so tired of living from paycheck to paycheck. the rich always seem to have what ever they want. when the poor ask for help they just get laughed at and they get no help. the rich get driven around in shiny new cars and the poor are lucky to own a 12 year old car, then they have to buy insurance and gas and that fixes i so they can not buy much in food. WHEN WILL IT GET BETTER?
why is it that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? I am 58 years old and I have never owned a home. I am so tired of living from paycheck to paycheck. the rich always seem to have what ever they want. when the poor ask for help they just get laughed at and they get no help. the rich get driven around in shiny new cars and the poor are lucky to own a 12 year old car, then they have to buy insurance and gas and that fixes i so they can not buy much in food. WHEN WILL IT GET BETTER?
Whether the rich have inherited or earned their wealth, they have had to earn their lives by working harder and smarter than the rest of the population, in order to keep their treasures and make them grow. And please don't think they have fewer problems than you. They have, in different ways. For contentment, look for the things you DO have in your life, that you might enjoy and start appreciating, rather than comparing and complaining, and looking for someone to "rescue" you. It isn't going to happen. "One of these days is none of these days."
why is it that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? I am 58 years old and I have never owned a home. I am so tired of living from paycheck to paycheck. the rich always seem to have what ever they want. when the poor ask for help they just get laughed at and they get no help. the rich get driven around in shiny new cars and the poor are lucky to own a 12 year old car, then they have to buy insurance and gas and that fixes i so they can not buy much in food. WHEN WILL IT GET BETTER?
Whether the rich have inherited or earned their wealth, they have had to earn their lives by working harder and smarter than the rest of the population, in order to keep their treasures and make them grow. And please don't think they have fewer problems than you. They have, in different ways. For contentment, look for the things you DO have in your life, that you might enjoy and start appreciating, rather than comparing and complaining, and looking for someone to "rescue" you. It isn't going to happen. "One of these days is none of these days."
Newsflash:
The Poor are Getting Richer
Bill Whittles latest Afterburner examines the state of poverty in America.
We always, ceaselessly hear whining from the class-envy-breeding socialists in America that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. When youre not a millionaire, thats an easy propaganda line to believe. Envy is a base human emotion thats easy to stoke. But is it true? Are Americas poor out there suffering, and suffering more all the time?
Not really. Oh, theres some real poverty out there. I should know, since by American standards I grew up pretty poor; Whittle also describes how he grew up poor by American standards. But Ive been to a few other countries over the course of my life and Ive seen real poverty. Ive seen poverty that is generational, systemic, the kind that is almost impossible for people to get out of even with their hardest work and best work ethic.
You see, here in America, we dont have economic systems like full-blown Marxism or socialism (yet, thank God) that keep people down and make it very hard for their enterprise and ingenuity to bring rewards. We dont have religious caste systems that keep people locked into a lower class. We dont have the kind of longstanding and institutionalized corruption (yet, thank God) that some countries have which keep most citizens locked in a cycle of poverty.
No, here in America, we have opportunity. We have the freedom and latitude a person can use to become a Bill Gates or live in relative poverty if they have no drive. Its up to them.[
]More: http://www.dakotavoice.com/2011/08/...utm_campaign=Feed:+DakotaVoice+(Dakota+Voice)
why is it that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? I am 58 years old and I have never owned a home. I am so tired of living from paycheck to paycheck. the rich always seem to have what ever they want. when the poor ask for help they just get laughed at and they get no help. the rich get driven around in shiny new cars and the poor are lucky to own a 12 year old car, then they have to buy insurance and gas and that fixes i so they can not buy much in food. WHEN WILL IT GET BETTER?
Tell that to these people. And if you haven't seen any of them yet, wait awhile. They will be appearing near you soon.[...]it seems, Mikey, that you have been tricked into believing some bogus propaganda....
Tent cities rise across the country - US news - Life - msnbc.com
Compare the poor in this nation to that in the rest of the world. Our poor are the wealthiest poor in the world. Then compare the state of the poor today as compared to what they had access to, 10, 25, 50, 100 years ago and you will see INCREDIBLE strides to making poverty comfortable. You interested in living like the New York City poor circa 1911? In a cold water tenement flat with 15 other people, working in a garment factory a few blocks away, with 1 bathroom for the entire floor of 200 people, working for a few cents a day 16 hour days at hard manual labor? That was the working poor's lot 100 years ago in NYC. Go into the country and be a hardscrabble dirt farmer. Have to heat the house with wood or cattle dung. Barely making subsistence farming with a little extra done for crafts like quilting and making your own clothes, and not even a radio or electric lightbulb to your name? If your horse gets sick, you stand on the edge of starvation and financial ruin.I'm wondering why people keep saying that the poor are getting richer. Is that so everybody will feel better while the rich hoover all the wealth out of the country?? Point at them and shake your head. "Oh, BAD poor people! When will you learn that poverty is supposed to HURT!?"
So what if they're living paycheck-to-paycheck, or their spouse has taken to drinking, gambling, or snorting said paycheck away? Or if they bought those things at Gamestop, because at least it keeps the kids off the street. Yeah, I know there are people buying steak and lobster on the dole. That doesn't mean we kill the safety net, period. That means REFORM, but the cons don't want that. Boehner doesn't, Cantor doesn't, the Tea Party doesn't. They want to kill the programs, kill America, and parcel out what's left to their cronies.
It's disgusting, and I'm sick of what's left of the middle class and those below them going to bat for the rich. They're going to do just fine taking this country down, and you'll have yourselves to thank.
One aspect of "American exceptionalism" was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens felt "middle class". A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labour supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s.
Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, as US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women's liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment. US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labour.
US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped raising wages. When basic labour scarcity became labour excess, not only real wages, but eventually benefits, too, would stop rising. Over the last 30 years, the vast majority of US workers have, in fact, gotten poorer, when you sum up flat real wages, reduced benefits (pensions, medical insurance, etc), reduced public services and raised tax burdens. In economic terms, American "exceptionalism" began to die in the 1970s.
The rich, however, have got much richer since the 1970s, as every measure of US income and wealth inequality attests. The explanation is simple: while workers' average real wages stayed flat, their productivity rose (the goods and services that an average hour's labour provided to employers). More and better machines (including computers), better education, and harder and faster labour effort raised productivity since the 1970s. While workers delivered more and more value to employers, those employers paid workers no more. The employers reaped all the benefits of rising productivity: rising profits, rising salaries and bonuses to managers, rising dividends to shareholders, and rising payments to the professionals who serve employers (lawyers, architects, consultants, etc).
"What a strange animal man is in that he is so willing to be caged." Athena in 'Appleseed'Strange thing. So - they started while Bush was President, but now they're called "Obamaville." Hmm.
England's take on it,
The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes | Richard Wolff | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
One aspect of "American exceptionalism" was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens felt "middle class". A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labour supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s.
Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, as US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women's liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment. US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labour.
US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped raising wages. When basic labour scarcity became labour excess, not only real wages, but eventually benefits, too, would stop rising. Over the last 30 years, the vast majority of US workers have, in fact, gotten poorer, when you sum up flat real wages, reduced benefits (pensions, medical insurance, etc), reduced public services and raised tax burdens. In economic terms, American "exceptionalism" began to die in the 1970s.
The rich, however, have got much richer since the 1970s, as every measure of US income and wealth inequality attests. The explanation is simple: while workers' average real wages stayed flat, their productivity rose (the goods and services that an average hour's labour provided to employers). More and better machines (including computers), better education, and harder and faster labour effort raised productivity since the 1970s. While workers delivered more and more value to employers, those employers paid workers no more. The employers reaped all the benefits of rising productivity: rising profits, rising salaries and bonuses to managers, rising dividends to shareholders, and rising payments to the professionals who serve employers (lawyers, architects, consultants, etc).
Gracious, another country heard from.
Dear Queen Elizabeth;
Please take us back.
Love; Barack
Some will find our key results cause for normative concern, John D. Griffin of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Claudia Anewalt-Remsburg of the University of Notre Dame wrote in their study. The two researchers found that wealthier members of Congress were more likely to vote for bills to reduce and repeal the federal estate tax. The same held true for the likelihood of cosponsoring legislation to reduce or repeal the estate tax. The statistical association between a representatives personal wealth and their opposition to the estate tax remained even when factors such as age, party affiliation, their constituents opinions and antitax views were accounted for.
For their study, Griffin and Anewalt-Remsburg investigated the battle over the repeal of the estate tax in the 109th House of Representatives, along with annual financial disclosure reports and National Taxpayers Union (NTU) scores. The 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey also provided the researchers with data regarding district-level opinion of the estate tax. Financial assets alone were not an absolute predictor of whether a representative supported repealing the estate tax. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), for instance, bucked the trend by opposing efforts to repeal the estate tax despite her personal fortune. Former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), another outlier, supported repealing the estate tax despite having nothing to gain financially from doing so.
But the general trend showed that personal wealth influenced support for repealing the estate tax, despite these exceptions. Griffin and Anewalt-Remsburg emphasized that representatives were not simply voting to repeal the estate tax for their own personal gain. Wealth was only one factor among several that influence behavior. This fact does not diminish the import of our conclusion that legislator wealth affects behavior even after accounting for a number of potential confounding factors, but instead places it in a proper context, they concluded.
Source
