There have been a few posts lately that express the notion that poor people are lazy and looking for handouts whereas rich people are hardworking, noble, and the source of all good. Basically Ayn Rand rehashed, only with even less literary style.

But when you consider that in previous ages it was the rich who hired the military (every little warlord or petty duke or noble had his own troops) then we see that the billions and billions the U.S. spends on 'defense' (i.e. 'attack', as in Iraq and so many other small weak nations since World war II) and which the U.S. subsidizes from general tax revenues is in fact protecting the investment of the rich at no cost to themselves. As a result, the U.S. 'can't afford' universal medicare and so forth for its own citizens .

Some facts:

Those who benefit from clout in the oil rich nations of the middle east are those, like the Presidential Bushes, who make money on oil and would very much like to continue to do so, except more.

Those whose lives are on the line are, by and large, the sons and daughters of poor people: the poor subsidize the little tax breaks and foreign adventures of the rich with blood, as well as money.

Remember Reagan and the 'trickle down' notion? That tax breaks which make the rich richer are 'a good thing' because of the money that trickles down, like crumbs off a well-laden table, to the poor rats below?

Well, even that doesn't apply any more. Now that the U.S.'s most 'successful' (in terms of profits made for U.S. corporations) export is jobs, the beneficiaries are the foreign poor.

Which is I guess a good thing for the foreign poor. I just don't understand why the U.S. public continues to vote in the pack of jackals that are in power now.

Oh, I wonder if it could be because the jackals have muddied the waters, created a smokescreen, dragged a herring across the path, (stop me before I drag out another metaphor, please) by creating a bunch of 'moral' issues (about which the likes of Bush could care less) to confuse the voters.

Enter the Religious Right.

But no! That couldn't be true! Could it?

Greedy, selfish, miserly people prefer to blame the poor and the unfortunate for their condition. It is easier to believe that the poor are lazy, free-loading malingerers than to explain why they, themselves may appear stingy and uncharitable. Why do you suppose some find it advantageous to claim to be 'compassionate' conservatives as opposed to simply 'conservative' ?

It is no coincidence that they usually parade their church-going moral rectitude publicly. They really need to. Sort of the "protest too much" syndrome. If you want to feel superior to everybody else, you have to keep reinforcing that illusion. At the last minute, when the grim reaper looms, they can always give some of it back. The camel and eye of the needle thing.

Lazy, freeloading who? Lazy to have other people's sons and daughters do their fighting. Freeloading to have the average taxpayer pay for their little overseas adventures.

The worst I can accuse the working people and middle class people of is being gullible. Does the average ambulance driver or optometrist say to him/herself, "Gee, let's invade some little country today. I'll volunteer my son, how about yours? And if we do without universal medicare and daycare and a few other things, we can even buy them some nifty weapons of mass destruction!"

Hardly. It's the ones like Bush, who don't personally care to be actively engaged in war's nastiness and danger, who make up some lie about invading Iraq to bring them democracy, who want American money and American kids to finance and to fight foreign wars.

As with Vietnam, we Canadians opted not to be part of it. But we live in the same world, and it's getting more dangerous.

HEY im lazy and looking for a handout so please pass your money my way. i really need it.
give me give me give me $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

"Taxpayers" - Can you help?

There isn't any virtue in being either poor or rich or somewhere in between as most of us are. You will find good people who are rich and good people that are poor. By the same token, you can find bad people who are rich and bad people who are poor. If everyone is rich, there is no one to be workers. If everyone is poor, there is no one to provide jobs.

Certainly laziness and a welfare mentality will lead to poverty or criminal activity. On the other hand, some rich people have gotten wealth by nefarious methods. We have seen a lot of this in Guatemala. Todays wealthy (and I mean multimillionaires) were yesterday's poverty stricken. How did they get to be so rich in such a short time? Not by hard work, you can be sure. They got that way through politics, criminal activities such as drugs, car theft rings, kidnappings or any other illegal activity you can think of and some you never dreamed of. Law, Order and Justice as we know it has collapsed so anything goes that you can get away with.

The rich provide jobs for the poor and even if the poor think they are exploited and don't get enough, something is better than nothing. Several years ago the coffee market collapsed. The big coffee plantations could not sell their coffee for enough to cover costs so they didn't harvest. The end result was that a portion of the population that depended on the income from harvesting coffee on big plantations to suppliment their meagar incomes from their own farming activities, literally starved and are still starving because it takes time for the coffee plantations to get back on their feet again.

The poor complain a lot about the rich, but the truth is that they depend on the rich for jobs. The government is a non-productive entity by definition. It gets its revenue from taxes and that means that people have to have jobs and incomes in order to pay taxes to keep the government going.

And in the end, there is nothing the poor want more than to become "the rich."

im poor and im rich so please pas your money my way and ill put it to good use. i suppose im a tax payer or is it that i pay the rich's.
hummmm i must think now (ouch that hurts)im not going to think any more. bye now

DD says:

quote:

And in the end, there is nothing the poor want more than to become "the rich."

Very true. Some poor even adore the rich!

The point of my question, however, was not who is more moral, the rich or the poor.

It was that if the rich had to pay for their wars, in money and blood, they might not rush to war as they do now. As it is, it is the sons and daughters of the poor, by and large, that do the bleeding, and the average taxpayer does the paying.

The bloody-mindedness of the current administration in the U.S. puts us all -- everyone in the world -- at risk.

Stop Feeding the Government.
Get US out of the UN.