Happy birthday, USA. Thank you for letting me live a part of your history.
You’ve made me who I am today, and for that — and for so many things — I am truly grateful.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
I don’t really pay attention to generation labels. I mean, I know what a couple of the names are, but I haven’t a clue as to where they fall in the age spectrum (my age spectrum, specifically), or what, if anything, any of those groups want. I also don’t know what the ethos of each group is, assuming there is such a thing. I can see certain characteristics, such as people having grown up using phones as a child, or their feeling a sense of doom or lack of hope for the future, but not everyone in any particular generation is the same. For example, while there could be a lot of clownishly-dressed protestors in a particular generation, there could also be what used to be called “clean cut” people trying to create a different life for themselves.
To be honest, I don’t have a lot of contact with the youngest generations, and when I do, they are generally respectful. I’m also aware that a whole lot of younger people follow the socialist party line of “billionaires bad, trillionaires worse.” But then again, so do a lot of people of all ages. Too many people are totally ignorant about how money is made and how wealth is created. Wealth is not a single pie of limited size, as they seem to presume. Every wealth creator (people who own businesses and who work at them) adds to the size of the pie, which benefits everyone. And even if those wealth creators were taxed out of existence, not much, if any, of that money will end up in the hands of those ignorant folk. There are too many grifters out there already standing in line with their hands out.
I also know that a lot of younger generations are unpatriotic; apparently many see the country as a hellhole with no redeeming characteristics. But then, so do a lot of the older generations. Outrage seems to be the name of their game, and algorithms only feed their insularity. Others are simply apathetic.
Lately, though, I’ve been seeing a different side of those young folks. Two young men started “Relay for America,” a run to carry the flag from the Pacific Coast to Washington DC — keeping that flag moving day and night, without stopping. Over 250 official relay runners have signed up, and others join them along the route. Each mile is dedicated to a veteran. Their hope is to unite America with this show of patriotism and community.
Another couple of young men (one who has entirely too much energy and soles of leather since he runs barefoot) started a running club called Unify America. They travel to various places, run with a flag, hoping to spread their message of love and joy and patriotism.
Recently, the second group joined the first for part of the relay. Symbolic, that.
This show of patriotism, fitness, and solidarity gives me hope. Perhaps the communist ideals creeping through the country are not a foregone conclusion. Perhaps there is a spiritual, maybe even a political, balance at play.
Another thing that gives me hope is the rise of independent journalism. Young people with phones and cameras and a steadfast desire to tell the truth are a perfect foil for the propaganda of the alphabet press. Instead of sitting in air-conditioned studios parroting the approved stories, those young journalists are out there, standing on their own two shod feet, showing what the established press doesn’t want us to see.
Even if they’re not out gathering their own stories, there is a growing group of conservative podcasters who try to dispel the lies that are so often peddled by far-left extremists, especially those of a similar age, and to tell the truth as they live it.
It’s good to know that these young men and women are out there. They bring hope to world. And to me.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
“Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.” [Thomas Sowell]
Even people who should know better think wealth falls from the sky. Or as if it’s packed away in a vault somewhere and is crying out to be evenly distributed. Whatever the mechanism, they think no one should be worth a trillion dollars, or even a billion. They simply can’t understand that wealth is not the same as cash. For example, the so-called boomer generation is supposedly sitting on the biggest fortune ever, but the median value of their wealth is about $360,000. Anyone can see at a glance that their wealth is in their house, since the median house cost in the USA is $400,000. Younger generations scream about the unfairness, and yet, for the older folk living frugally in their own home, the wealth is illusory. There is no cash, not for a lot of retirees, so what do the younger generations want? For the older folks to sell their home, and then what? Live on the street?
The average wealth of that generation is much higher, of course, because it is skewed by the small percentage of very wealthy folks, which is why using the median number is more accurate. With the median, half of people in that age group are worth more, half are worth less. Still, it’s a good example of “wealth” not equating to “cash.”
So why am I talking about this yet again? I was at lunch with a group of women yesterday when the topic of “the new trillionaire” came up. That’s what they called him. Apparently, they had no idea what his name was, how he became so wealthy, what he actually does and what he contributes to the world. Just that he’s worth a trillion dollars, and that he needs to distribute it to . . . to them, I guess.
I kept quiet, not wanting to get into any of the material I’m presenting here, but the truth is, he’s created perhaps 1,000,000 jobs, not just those people working for him directly, but the people who work in companies who supply him with his raw materials, to say nothing of the 4,400 millionaires he created, the taxes he pays, and the money he donates. He has no money, no piles of cash sitting in his vault like Scrooge McDuck. His wealth is his business. His wealth is the dreams he allows people to dream. Mars! Interstellar travel! People with severe neurological disabilities walking again! The blind seeing again!
Dreams.
What are such dreams worth?
Anyone with a normal brain in their head should be able to understand that this “trillionaire” is doing way more with his wealth — the wealth he himself created — than the government usually does with the same amount.
Besides, despite what people believe, the more money the government throws at a problem, the worse it becomes because there is more money to pay for the same amount of services. To really solve the housing crisis, you build houses people can afford and increase the supply. To solve the job problem, you create more jobs. To solve the poverty problem, you make government benefits less than what people can earn to give them an incentive to change their lives. In not one of these solutions is there a call to take money from a trillionaire. In not one of these solutions is there a call for more government intervention.
For an historical example: the great depression was gradually resolving itself, but then the government decided to help, tossed tons of money into the pot, and kept the depression going for ten years. Some people think that was the point, part of a worldwide reset, but I have no idea of the truth other than that throwing extra money at a problem exacerbates it, and among all those smart people were some who probably knew that. As with any ill, the best thing to do is to find the underlying cause and work on that, not the symptoms.
I’m sure the women I was with today are glad I didn’t get on my soapbox, though I’m just as sure you wish I’d delivered my sermon to them and not to you. Still, you have the option to not read. Just as I have the option to write.
None of this, of course, gets us any wealthier, but it does help to put things into perspective. And I get to put my research to use, so there’s that.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
I wasn’t going to do any more political posts — as I keep saying, it’s getting too dangerous. Not that I’m bringing myself to anyone’s attention, it’s just that the internet is forever, and who knows what will be the end of this push toward, not just socialism, but communism.
So what got my goat this time? The socialists/communists are saying they want a Scandinavian-type socialism rather than a Venezuelan-type, which, of course, shows their ignorance, or perhaps shows that they are relying on the ignorance of their constituents.
To be honest, I’m just as ignorant about how things work over there as anyone else, though I do know a few basics. The Nordic Model combines capitalism with an extensive government-funded social welfare system. In particular, what Sweden has is a parliamentary representative democratic constitutional monarchy, which seems to mean that the power comes from the people, with the prime minister as head of the government, the king head of parliament, and officials elected by the people to represent them. They are a capitalist state with a large taxpayer funded welfare system. Meaning that, unlike true socialism, people own their businesses, not the state.
Because of Sweden’s early free market system, by 1970, they were one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Then, in 1970, they began playing around with socialism. The government was horrifically expanded, taxes were massive, wealthy businesses left the country, zero jobs were created. By 1990, they realized their experiment was a disaster. They discovered they could have big business or big government, not both. As Kjell-Olof Feldt, Social Democratic Minister of Finance (1983–1990) said: “What we believed in as young socialists simply turned out to be impossible in practice.”
Now, their socialism is funded heavily by low and middle-income families, not just the rich. It’s still not a utopia by any means. As with all western countries, their open borders have created a high incidence of gang-related shootings, problems with local integration, and a huge drain on their welfare system.
So why do I know all this? Pippi Longstocking. Do you remember her? The storybook hero we all (especially us quiet bookish types), admired so much?
In 1970, at the beginning of the Swedish socialist experiment, Astrid Lindgren, the author of the Pippi Longstocking books, was sent a tax bill for 102% of her earnings. Yep. Socialism on steroids. (Socialists seem to like to steal from authors. One bestselling author is trying to leave a neighboring country, but he can’t leave until he forks over about 65% of his investments via an “exit tax.” Not his income, not his realized capital gains. His investments and savings. So, he can stay and spend an ever-increasing share of the tax burden, or he can leave and lose more than half of what he’d spent his life earning.)
Anyway, Astrid Lundgren fought back like an author — she wrote allegories that were very obviously a critique of the government’s tax system, but that people loved and understood. The press called her selfish. The prime minister blamed her for betraying the country. But she kept writing. And talking. She explained about the unfairness of a tax that punished the people who created wealth by stealing even more from them than they earned. People listened. In 1976, they voted out the Social Democratic Party that had ruled for over forty years.
The tax system was overhauled. Still, they didn’t dump socialism for another fifteen years.
So the moral of this story is . . . well, I’m not sure what the ultimate message is, but one is never to underestimate the power of an author beloved the world over. Another is not to listen to what the communists in the United States are saying about the “good” socialism they want, because the truth is that socialism doesn’t work, and you can’t tax the rich ad infinitum.
And of course, in my case, the main moral is not to get me riled up.
Though it did give me a blog topic, so there’s that.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
I find it ironic that politicians who scream about citizens making (ie: creating) too much money and profess the need to confiscate that wealth through punitive taxes, never once promise to give back the millions that have stuck to their fingers during their tenures as “servants” of the people. The mega-millionaires in Congress seem to be the loudest of the “eat the rich” contingent yet don’t see themselves as one of the problems. Apparently, their money is theirs. And so is everyone else’s money.
Too many people agree because they don’t understand that created wealth — wealth that is invested in business and creating thousands of jobs — is not the same as money in the bank. They complain that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes, and yet if everyone were taxed at the same rate, those same people would be complaining about their tax bill. The richest pay around 35% of their income in federal taxes. The middle group pays about 15%. The workers at the lowest end either pay minimal taxes, or they don’t pay into the system at all but are instead given money via Earned Income Tax Credits. (There is a wide range in each of these categories, but these are the averages I found.)
An even bigger irony comes from those communist mayors (calling them democratic socialists doesn’t change the nature of their rhetoric) who have never held a job in their life, led affluent lives because of family wealth, and yet now pretend to be bringing about a better life for working people while a) making things worse, and b) somehow getting richer.
I’ve never understood why working-class people listen to such hypocrites, except perhaps that they think that when the billionaires are taxed to death, then some of the money will be parceled out to them. I certainly don’t understand this push toward turning the United States into a communist country; it’s the surest way for everyone to go broke. Except for those at the top, of course.
A current scheme is a wealth tax, which never worked in the countries that tried it, but apparently, people still think it’s a good idea. But the trouble is, if they tax unrealized capital gains, then the owners of the company will have to sell off part of the company, which means people losing their jobs, which means fewer taxes overall. Also, all sorts of retirement funds that are invested in those companies lose money, because the sell-off will lower the value of the stock, which means the vulnerable also lose out. And of course, the politicians won’t bother giving a rebate for the loss of the rich person’s wealth when the stocks go down. And yet, when the stocks go back up again, they will again tax those unrealized gains, which means double tax on the same money. So bizarre!
I guess the moral of the story is that one doesn’t need to know economics to be in congress — or a mayor — though it should be a requirement. But then, it’s never about the truth, just the perceived truth. At least as long as it gets them reelected.
Which brings me to the biggest irony of all — that I, who have always had a head-down approach to the shenanigans of the political class, am not only aware of such doings but am blogging about it.
I might have to do something about that — not the shenanigans, which I have no control over, but the writing.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
That some working multi-billionaires (those who created their fortunes through buying or creating companies with services people want) are worth way more than almost everyone else offends the “equity” folk. They think that outcomes should be the same for everyone. Since not everyone has the intelligence, resources, and focus to make such a valuable impact on the world, then it makes perfect sense (to them) to take the wealth from the rich and give it to those without the genetic gifts, education, and determination to make their own fortunes. Somehow, this “intelligence tax” is supposed to even things out.
Truly, I don’t understand why everything has to be even. The Marxist ideal supposedly is “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” but as of yet, we do not live in a Marxist society. Nor do we live in a fair world, and nothing will ever make it fair.
Everyone has different talents and attributes. Some of these attributes naturally give a person an edge that others don’t have. Not just intelligence, as mentioned above, but height, beauty, athletic ability.
If everyone is supposed to end up in the same place, then what are people going to do about these gifted folk? You can more or less even the playing field when it comes to smarts by lowering the standards of tests to make sure everyone passes.
But how do you even the playing field when it comes to height? Being tall gives people an overall advantage because their height evokes feelings of power and consequence. Tall people also make more money. Every inch of height over average translates to an extra $800 a year, so how would the “equity” folk remove this natural advantage? Cut off heads? Feet?
Beautiful people also have an advantage. People equate beauty with intelligence, kindness, and honesty, though beautiful people aren’t necessarily better than unattractive ones. They are simply perceived as such. People tend to accept lies from beautiful people while shying away from truths told by unattractive ones. And beautiful people earn more — as much as 12% more on average. So how would this be equalized? Force beautiful people to wear masks?
Athletic prowess is widely divergent even among athletes. I suppose, to even the “score” (so to speak), athletes could be forced to carry weights like racehorses. If a horse with all its accoutrements weighs less than the assigned limit, jockeys need to add extra weights so all horses in the race carry the same handicap. Golfers have handicaps, so why not all athletes? Wouldn’t that make everything more “equitable?” Wouldn’t that allow everyone, no matter how little expertise they have, the same opportunity to play professional sports?
It seems to me as if those people espousing equity are trying to make the world fit the individual rather than giving the individuals the skills to try to fit themselves into the world.
But then, no one is asking me.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
I was going to write about the history behind what is happening today, going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton’s economic system of tariffs, domestic manufacturing, and sovereignty, but then changed my mind because I’m not sure it’s a good idea to get on my soapbox in today’s political climate. Still, Hamilton’s system is worth a mention because it is what made American great, what created wealth in this country, what developed an unprecedented middle class who kept the money they earned without it being taxed away. (Tariffs were always supposed to be the way the United States government supported itself, not taking from its citizens.) This Hamilton system (what is left of it) is the very system that that globalists want destroyed. For over one hundred years, their mission has been to gut the USA middle class, leaving only high earners who make the money and a political class that takes the money and gives what it doesn’t keep to low earners. It’s why manufacturing was sent overseas — the globalists convinced the political hacks that people wanted cheap goods more than they wanted jobs, and so the middle class dwindled. (You can’t have a one world government if one country is wealthy while others are mired in chaos, so since they couldn’t raise the entire world to the USA standards, they decided to lower the USA to third world standards.)
It’s been hard watching this destruction my whole life. And no, it’s not a democrat vs. republican thing — it’s a combined political class that bought into the corruption, thinking that having all countries run by a so-called “world-based order” was a good thing. (The globalists kept their power by playing one country against the other politically, where the Hamilton system was about creating working relationships with other countries by trading as equals.) Many political hacks have kept their own power through several degrowth cycles, though I wonder if they ever see their end — the end, of course, is rule by an international elite that makes the political class in each country obsolete. I also wonder if they are as ignorant as they seem — too many of them seem to think wealth simply exists. They don’t seem to see that wealth needs to be created. Hamilton knew this. You’d think that people who have been running this country for decades would know the truth. Unless they do know and their naïveté is part of the game?
The huge influx of illegals into all the western countries was part of this degrowth — a way of crashing the economies of the western countries, leaving them un-sovereign and at the mercy of the globalists. (The one thing I didn’t realize until recently was that this gutting of the middle class by off-shoring manufacturing, energy dependency, and an acceptance of anti-white racism was aimed at European countries too. How else to explain the British allowing a quarter of a million girls to be groomed and trafficked and murderers set free because people in positions of power class didn’t want to be called racist.)
Because of what previous administrations in the USA allowed, without any real objection from voters until recently, we came very close to what those globalists envisioned — a chaotic USA that could be grabbed up by those who have been aiming for that very thing since before the Civil War. And no, it’s not the same people — the originators of the scheme are long dead, unless, as some people claim, those originators have cracked the code of longevity — but the system and its aims are the same.
Weirdly, in an age of overwhelming information, most of this information isn’t easily found anymore. I did my early studying with real paper books, and paper books are a lot harder to destroy than information on the internet. I went looking online for information about a couple of people — one I know is helping fund the “mostly peaceful” demonstrations in this country, and another I know was part of a grooming industry that involved all sorts of celebrities and powerful people, and almost no negative information about these “benevolent” folks exists. Apparently, they have whole swarms of internet drones who do nothing but scrub the internet, and if they can’t erase the information, they bury it under thousands of new posts that are liked and shared by their bots until it all but disappears. I don’t know why they bother — much of the information available on the internet is leftist leaning, anyway, and AI seems to downplay any mention of conservative values (such as more autonomy and less government).
I used to get upset with people for wearing blinders, but I’ve come to see it’s not them so much as the algorithms. They are never shown a point of view they might disagree with, and so one’s world view is constantly reinforced. Nothing that might challenge that view is ever shown, unless, of course, their outrage needs stoking.
I know this firsthand. I have two separate internet accounts, each using a different browser, and each feed is totally different. Apparently, one browser thinks I am a demonic democrat and the other a rabid republican, when in fact, I am neither. I am a student. A watcher. A pattern recognizer. Nothing more.
Oops. I guess I got on my soapbox anyway. Oh, well.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
Hypothetical questions like this make me think — not about the question I’m supposed to blog about, but the mechanics of it.
Truly, assuming there was something I wished I could tell my twenty-year old self, how would that work?
At first, I thought of leaving a message somewhere for me to find when I reached this age, but then I realized that’s the reverse of the question. Besides, there’s nothing my twenty-year old self could say to me today that would make any difference. If there was something that was important enough for that younger version of me to want forwarded into the future, it’s already been done. First, there is a little thing called a memory. Second, even if I don’t recall the important thing itself, it would be written in my very life — everything that ever happened to me stemmed from the thoughts of that year (and every year) so any message would be redundant.
As for the logistics of getting a message back to that younger self — reverse email? But email hadn’t been invented back then. That twenty-year old self would have to wait several more decades to receive the message, and by then, she’d be almost as old as I am now. If not that, then what? Time travel? Okay, so assume I went back in time, how would I ever convince that person I was her? I’m sure she’d think I was a relation, perhaps a great-aunt or some such because I did at one time bear a distinct resemblance to my mother.
I remember when I was young not ever actually thinking that old people were forever old, but I somehow presumed it. I knew people grew older, but it just seemed to me, in that accepting way of youth, that they were old, and had always been, just as I was young, and would always be. It makes sense, I suppose — when you’re young, you can see the changes in yourself as you graduate to a new grade every year, but the older folks always looked the same. I don’t know when it struck me that old folks had once been young, that they’d lived a whole life before getting old, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen until later in my twenties or even in my thirties. (I knew people aged, of course, but old age seemed so alien to my young self that I never made the connection.)
So there my young self would be, seeing this old woman, and no way would my twenty-year old self ever believe that I was this old. Oddly, I doubt that my current self would even recognize that young self. Odder still, now that I’m old, I feel as if I’ve always been old, as if I’d never been young. I mean, I know I was, but . . . who can remember that far back? Or care? It is easier just to accept what I am today and go with that feeling rather than give credence to a past.
Which means, I suppose, that even if I could go back and tell my twenty-year old self something, there’s nothing I would wish to tell her.
As for the photo accompanying this article, I realize it’s not my twenty-year old self, but nowadays, one young age is as remote as the other.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
I’ve always prided myself on my vocabulary, a vocabulary gleaned from my vast reading over the years. This vocabulary doesn’t translate to speaking because many words I know and know how to use I don’t know how to pronounce, and I’m leery of using such words ever since I was made fun of at a young age for mispronouncing “macabre.” At the time, I was being driven home by the father of the children I’d been babysitting, and for some reason I used the word, pronouncing it as “mackaber.” I still remember his laughter. So, since I’ve never been able to handle being made fun of, I only use words that everyone else does, though I don’t hesitate to use any word I wish in my writing, confident that my spelling is correct.
Well, I was confident until yesterday. I was writing something, I don’t even remember where or what, and I used the word “miniscule,” which is how I’ve always seen the word written. Whatever spell check that particular site was using flagged it as wrong, and said the word was “minuscule.”
Not believing the program since I’d never seen that spelling and since neither MSWord nor my blog has ever flagged the word, I looked it up online, and sure enough, the word is “minuscule.” How is it that I have lived all these decades and not known that? It’s also pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable. I did not know that either.
Further reading tells the story. “Minuscule” used to refer to lower case letters (the minus coming from Latin meaning less) as opposed to “majuscule,” referring to uppercase letters. It seems to me that since “minuscule” refers to something being simply lesser, rather than something very tiny, “miniscule” (pronounced with its emphasis on the first syllable) should be a word in its own right.
And it’s getting there. Although “miniscule” is still considered a typo by purists (which I thought I was but apparently am not), the correct spelling is “minuscule.”
Except when it’s not. “Miniscule” has been used since 1871, though it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became an accepted variation that wasn’t always flagged as a typo. My print dictionary includes “miniscule,” and mentioned that it’s a variation of “minuscule.” So whew! Maybe I’m not as far off as I thought I was.
So even though it may or may not be a full-fledged word, I will continue using “miniscule.” It sounds like what it should mean: something vanishingly small.
It is funny, though, that a word such as minuscule/miniscule is only slowly evolving, but other words are almost instantaneously accepted, like my most unfavorite word, “veggie.”
Oh, well. I learned something, which is always a good thing, even if it did deflate my already under-inflated ego.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
I read something interesting the other day. The writer claimed that the default setting of humans is poverty. Which is true when you think of it. For as far back in history as you can research or imagine, humans lived in poverty so vast that even the poorest person today is wealthy by comparison. People today seem to think that the hunter-gatherer culture was a myth, just a morality tale to make a point about being grateful for what we have. But that’s the way humans lived for tens of thousands of years. Even in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance years, where learning and the building arts were at a highpoint, most people lived in poverty. Not only was wealth in short supply, what there was of it remained in the hands of a very few, and even those folks — kings and other nobles — weren’t wealthy by today’s standards.
What is truly remarkable about our current life is that there is any wealth at all. Even more remarkable is that the overall wealth of the world is growing. So are opportunities to find your own source of wealth. Of course, most people don’t count wealth as I do — a warm place to live, a vehicle, appliances and all sorts of other labor saving-devices, food to buy in a grocery store rather than having the backbreaking job of growing it. There are also parks — local, state, national — to play in, and such open spaces had once been reserved for royal use only.
In today’s world, there are also all sorts of programs for people who either can’t or don’t want to work (and there are plenty of able-bodied people who simply prefer to sit around watching television six hours a day; this isn’t a guess — they make videos bragging about it). There are way too many homeless, though the money that was geared for those people seldom reached them and in fact was sometimes stolen and used by the administrators of such funds to buy multiple homes for themselves. And, too, a lot of homeless do cling to a life of addiction.
But for all that, we are generally living in a time of vast wealth — wealth that was created by human labor. (Except of course, for those who preferred to do such things as crash the currencies of other countries rather than come by their wealth honestly.) Human labor today is still creating wealth. Pulling assets from the earth, making things, selling those things, using that money to make other things and selling those other things and around and around it goes, with more wealth created every day. Working wealth — the wealth that is contained in on-going business concerns — is what keeps the world going. If there were no people creating more wealth, we’d all be scrambling for the bits that were left, until finally, the world would run down and we’d be back where we started — in abject poverty but with the memory of when we had it so good.
There is a growing hatred for the working wealth creators because people say that no one deserves the kind of wealth that some entrepreneurs have managed to accumulate (though they say nothing about the non-working billionaires who are funding the insurrections in this country), but the truth is, the wealth of the working rich is in their businesses. They do not have cash sitting in a bank. Very few of the working wealth creators have cash on hand. Their money goes into their businesses, which creates more wealth by creating more jobs, more products, even a higher standard to strive for.
Although the working wealthy are using their wealth to create more wealth for everyone, too many people think it needs to be stolen from them and given to those who don’t have the ability to create wealth. The problem is, if these working wealthy were to pay the vast sums in taxes that people think they need to pay, the wealthy would have to sell off large chunks of their businesses, which means they would lose control of their own companies, which means there would be a dearth of working capital, which means less aggregate wealth in the world.
With their money always in use, many (maybe even most) people who own high-performing businesses, borrow money to pay their employees because they are cash poor. Cash in constant circulation creates more wealth, more jobs, more . . . possibilities.
Humans are the ones who have created the wealth in the world today. As far as I know, dollars didn’t spew out with the big bang or on creation day or however the world came into being. Wealth came from human labor.
There used to be a time when people would hear of someone getting super rich and would think, “I can do that. Become rich. Maybe. Someday.” Now people see the wealth that’s created and they think, “They need to take his wealth away from him so I can get me some of that.”
Wealth isn’t a matter of everyone having the same amount of money because if it were, then there would be no money. If you take from the “haves” and give to “have less,” then why would anyone do anything to create wealth just to have it taken from them? They wouldn’t. Which would leave everyone sinking back into the default mode of poverty. Besides, if all the billionaires in the USA — supposedly there’s fewer than 1,000 of them — were taxed 100%, their taxes would fund the government for less than two years, so it’s much better to let them keep creating wealth.
People complain about loopholes that the wealthy businesses use to bring their taxes down, so the answer is not to take even more of their money but to lobby to close the loopholes, assuming those are loopholes and not just a way for the money to keep working. But for the most part, the taxes the wealthy pay are dependent on many things, so one year a fellow can pay 11 billion and the next year nothing. And even if the companies end up not paying taxes, the owners who take a salary and all the people they have working for them pay taxes, and generally a lot of taxes, because many of them become very high earners, so the aggregate taxes paid ends up being significant.
Whether or not the working wealthy “deserve” the money they make, is almost beside the point. Nowadays, I’d prefer to leave wealth in the hands of those who created it and who are continuing to create it. If you took it from them in the form of punitive taxes, then it would disappear into the same grifters’ hands where so much of the working people’s taxes are ending up. Why people are so accepting of that money being stolen, I have no idea, but throwing more money into a grifters pool does no one any good.
Either way, it doesn’t matter since the money is not going to end up in our pockets, neither mine nor yours.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
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