Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
I know this is hard for you to understand as a staunch constitutionalist, but it hurts our society as a whole and inhibits our progress (another word conservatives hate as the root of progressive) for wealth and power to be concentrated in the hands of a small minority. This is the reason the Republican Party pushed for the Sherman Anti-trust Act in 1890, which was enacted unanimously and why the Federal Trade Commission was started. It was a problem then and now is again.
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"it hurts our society as a whole ...for wealth and power to be concentrated in the hands of a small minority."
I completely agree that our nation would be better, if we had fewer poor people. I concede that whole-heartedly. Fair enough?
I see no connection, nor have you even tried to establish a connection, between the widening income inequality, and poverty.
Let's talk about how to help poor people become middle class, I'm all for that. I'll happily pay taxes to programs that are actually effective in this goal.
But please stop whining about the wealthy. They play just about no role in this. Not only do they not create poverty, they help reduce poverty by paying tons of taxes and giving so much to charity. There would be more poverty, not less, if Warren Buffet washed dishes instead of founded Berkshire Hathaway.
Stop demonizing the wealthy. It's stupid, it's dishonest, and it's intellectually lazy.
Even lack of money isn't the cause of most people's poverty, it's the symptom. The cause of poverty is usually bad decision-making, laziness, mental illness, or addiction. These are not things you make go away, by throwing money at them.
Of course, some people are poor because of bad luck or bad timing, and certainly they can permanently escape poverty with a little help, and we should give them that help, we have an obligation to do so in my opinion.
But one thing that liberals refuse to accept is this - you cannot eliminate poverty by giving money to poor people. If we coulda, we woulda, because we've given un-countable billions to poor people over the years.
We can and should try to eliminate poverty. None of what we need to do so, lies with a small number of billionaires. None. Zip. But liberals never, ever stop bitching about the 1%. Anything to divide us into a larger number of smaller groups to be pitted against one another - that's liberalism.
The Koch Brothers have been demonized by name on the floor of congress many times. For what? Have they ever been arrested or convicted of anything? How would you like it, if a US Senator stood in front of cameras, mentioned you by name, and told America that you were the enemy?