Declaring a Class Jihad
Did I miss a memo?
When did we decide as a nation that it was understandable and more importantly excusable to have generation after generation living off the government teat, but that it is inexcusable and for all intents and purposes prosecutable, to take advantage of the opportunities afforded in this country and work your way into wealth?
When did the “pursuit of happiness” become the right to happiness at someone else’s expense? When did we as a nation decide Robin Hood was a suitable role model for government? Why am I asking questions I already know the answer to? It all started many years ago but it came to fruition on January 20, 2009.
Liberals in this country have been promising folks a bigger piece if the pie for as long as we have had liberals. But historically it was deemed by these left-minded Salvationists to be the responsibility of the wealthier members of society’s to ensure that the poor and less fortunate at least had the ingredients and an oven to bake their own pie. Not so anymore. Now if you want a bigger piece of the pie, or hell, the whole pie altogether, all you have to do is take it from someone who already baked one. Does the phrase from the classic nursery rhyme Henny Penny “Who will help me eat the bread” ring a bell?
Democrats have shifted the focus from the opportunities that are available to make our own lives better, onto the assets some people have and how allegedly unfair it is that everybody doesn’t have the same. To be sure, there are those in this country that have acquired their wealth in what was laughingly called the old fashioned way, they inherited it. But the truth is that the vast majority (almost 95%) earned their wealth the real old fashioned way, they worked for it. And even for those that came by their wealth through inheritance, somebody worked for that money.
I am not one of the fortunate. I was born with these incredible good looks and charming personality instead of a tidy dowry. I have worked to get myself into a comfortable place but nowhere near what one would call wealthy. It never dawned on me that just because someone had something I didn’t have meant I was automatically entitled to it. If I saw someone with something I wanted it inspired me to work harder so I could get it too. That is the backbone of our nation, the desire to improve our lives through hard work and innovation and make things better for our children. But not anymore.
Where is my incentive to get up early every morning and spend my days studying or working if the government is simply going to step in after the fact and take what I have worked for to give it to someone who didn’t? My question to the Obama administration is, if we are here to serve others, what the hell are the others here for?
The policy course being set by the Democrats is so socialist in its principles that even some Democrats are starting baulk. As stated in the Wall Street Journal – “There could come a time,” said Rep. Michael McMahon, a freshman Democrat from New York City’s borough of Staten Island, when Democrats are in open rebellion. “We will certainly see in the next few weeks where we are going.”
To continually cite, as the Obama administration is doing, that these surtaxes and tax increases will effect only the top 1% of wage earners misses a very basic principle of economics. Every dollar taken from a taxpayer’s pocket, regardless of that taxpayer’s overall wealth, is taken out of the economy. Wealthy people buy things. Their spending creates jobs for people who are not wealthy but would like to be. If Congress takes billions of dollars out of these silk lined designer pockets, that’s a lot of products that are not going to be bought and a lot of jobs no longer needed to make those products.
You cannot win the war on poverty by instituting class warfare.
