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My aunt told me once that we should do more for the poor so they could improve their lives.
I told her to go to downtown Norfolk and pick out a "poor" person and give them 20k dollars. She was worth about 2 mil at the time. She looked at me like I was crazy. I told her if she gave the 20k to the govt, that same poor person would never see a dime of that money. (She died two years later and the property the family had bought 60 years earlier had been sold and she paid $500,000 in taxes on the inflation driven value of the property 6 months before she died).
Bottom line is even when you have a significant amount of money few people feel like they are the wealthy elite that we all love to hate. After all they are the ultimate minority, very few with a lot of capital.
Does anyone here actually know any of these wealthy egomaniacs? You know the ones who are pulling all of our strings, being as we all are such puppets to be so manipulated.
While I am sure there are some out there, most of the people I have known in my lifetime, in the category I would call fairly well off (others might call wealthy) the overwhelming majority are people who worked their arses off to get where they are and consider their success as not as significant as many would.
In fact I once calculated the value of the retirement commitments and medical benefit commitments my father earned with combat military service and civil service retirement and found it to be around 2 million dollars, depending on how long he lives, which is currently approaching 90 this May.
He sure does not fit the "elite" categorization.
You know when we go there, hating those who have succeeded (in our perspective) those same wealthy "elites" might just do the same thing the "elites" in Germany did in the 1930s, which is to get the heck out of this country and go somewhere where their success is appreciated. We all know how that scapegoat oriented society ended up, right?
A lot of wealthy people are old and in bad health, so lets hate them for success and ignore their medical condition. We wouldn't want to have to sympathise with someone who had money, now would we?
regards
Mech
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