I was watching "The Daily Show" tonight and Jon Stewart was mentioning about how Fox News wants to end unemployment insurance extensions as well as any help to poorer people. However, they want to keep the Bush Tax Cuts even if it is going to hurt the country. It sort of inspired me to write this.
Because unlike many people I have actually met people of all classes during my lifetime of rich, poor and in between and lived my life from start as lower middle class, Middle class, College student, Alternative person, Business owner, and eventually affluent starting during my late 40s. So, I have a perspective that many people who haven't had friends in literally all classes of people wouldn't understand.
The most alike of the classes are the rich and the poor and I see them as two sides of exactly the same coin. So, even though they have opposite problems they both are at core the same person in some ways.
The class that is really different than rich or poor is the middle class which in some ways is dying in the U.S. and western World (which is really awful because we cannot have healthy democracies without a healthy middle class).
Being stuck into the rich world for your whole life is just as crippling as your people only having been poor in recorded memory. Which is worse? Likely the worst thing is being mentally stuck in a really poor place without understanding that it's all in your head. If someone doesn't understand that there might be a way out of being poor then that is really pathetic.
However, the 2nd worst thing is to be rich and to hate the poor. Because as a rich person as you degrade poor people in your minds in some ways you become like them in your hatred and misunderstanding of them. Seeing the poor as less than you if you are rich isn't helpful and not only that it is a lie. What is the difference between a rich person and a poor person?
Luck and opportunities. These are really the only differences between rich people and poor people. However, poor people who become nouveau riche (newly rich) often don't stay rich because they don't realize that people only stay rich by properly investing their money so it can work for them. So, if you make a whole bunch of money and then just spend it all, soon you are poor again.
So, getting rich isn't the hard part. Staying rich is really really hard especially multi-generationally. That is the hardest thing to do of all. So, people who are able to legally pull that off are to be respected. Because that is a really tough thing to do. It takes real discipline not to spend your money and to just let it work for you for hundreds of years and to keep it growing while helping people whenever they can with all the interest and dividends of their investments. But while keeping those investments growing for their family and also so they can help others whenever a good opportunity shows up that is safe for them.
However, then there are poor people who basically have to do whatever it takes to survive. So, when you cut off unemployment compensation without offering them jobs (even if they are government sponsored jobs so they have some money coming in) you are going to create some people doing whatever they can do to survive. So, for example, if there aren't any jobs and people's unemployment compensation is cut off some people are going to do illegal things to make money which might put them in jail eventually.
So, cutting off unemployment compensation unless you are going to at least offer these people government sponsored jobs in a make work program is only going to be more expensive for the governments and states and counties and cities if some of these people get desperate enough to do illegal things because they might not be educated enough to start some kind of business or they might not be aware of help they might get from Unemployment offices around the country of training progams paid for by the states or Federal Government. So, unless people are educated enough to know what to do when unemployment compensation is cut off there are sure to be more problems around the country.
And consider the fact that 1.3 million people just got cut off from unemployment insurance and the ripple effects of that throughout our culture and society across the U.S.
No comments:
Post a Comment