SCREW THE RICH?

I've been going through one of those rare lucid moments in my life when I can attack issues with some degree of intelligence. 

The liberal left wants to take from the rich and keep it for themselves.  Oh, they'll tell you they want to give it to the poor, but when is the last time your saw a rich liberal give even a dime to the Salvation Army?  Those on the right will tell you that wealthy people and businesses contribute to the economy by hiring more people, so if you tax them, unemployment will stay high.  

So, there's the crux of that argument.  But, there's really more.  It's the wealthy individual and business that has invested so heavily in research and development, and I'm talking hundreds of billions of dollars.  It galls me that Bill Gates started his business in a garage with $1,000 and here he is in 2010 with billions and billions of dollars employing a helluva lot of people and the liberal left wants to take his money from him.  To top it all off, think about what the guy gives to charitable organizations and educational institutions.  Yet, without Bill Gates taking that initial risk, you wouldn't be reading this on a computer and I'd be typing it on an old, beat up Smith Corona.  

In fact, without Bill Gates' software research and development, your bank would still be hand-canceling checks and taking several weeks to print your statements.  Cell phones would not work, you couldn't pay for gas at the pump, carbon paper would still be in style... I can go on, and on.  

Howard Hughes impacted, and still is impacting the country in the same way.  What about the Waltons and... well, I can create a very long list here, and that's just of the super-rich.  There's a huge, huge list of people and organizations in the $10 million to $1 billion range who have contributed in so many ways to our culture, our way of life, our economy, ad infinitum.  The fact is, if it wasn't for the rich we'd still be washing clothes on a washboard and sending astronauts to outer space on a bicycle. 

How about this thought?  If you took all of the billions of dollars that billionaires in this country currently own and you used their money to pay down the national debt, you could not cover even one year's worth of government spending.  

That pretty much tells the whole story, doesn't it?