Can You Believe that?

       A little while ago, I mentioned the inequality of wealth and opportunity in America. That Canada and much of Europe was passing us out. The scary part of that report is that some of the countries where people fled from to come to America for a chance to succeed are looking more and more like the countries we should consider returning to in order succeed, because it ain't in America any more.
       That's not to say that you can't be successful in America, but it does mean that you're less likely to have it happen here than in these other countries. And some of the statistics blow my mind. Did you know that the wealthiest 1% of Americans own assets worth more than that of the bottom 90% of Americans? How about this one, the six Walmart heirs are worth more than the bottom 41%. Walmart! The folks who can't afford to pay their employees a living wage. But in fairness to those six heirs, they do teach those employees how to apply for government assistance.
       So what we're saying is that six people own more wealth than 155,800,000 people in America. That comes to 1 Walmart owner to every 25,970,000 people. I think they call that income inequality. But it's the opportunity inequality that's really hurting America. If you're poor or even middle class, the likelihood that you can succeed in America is much lower than in many other industrialized nations. How is it that we became also-rans? We can't even lay claim to the education superiority we used to have, anymore. As I've said before, the only statistic we can claim to be winning at is that we have more poor people than other industrialized countries.
       So, what should we do about this? Well, if you ask one of those Walmart heirs, they'll tell you to just get another part time job or two and quit whining. If you ask one of those 41%, you might hear something about redistribution of wealth. To be honest, neither way will help much. Creating an atmosphere where education is paramount and affordable would help, but we need changes to our immigration policies that make it possible that foreign entrepreneurs have a chance to come here and stay. We need to start electing people who actually have a desire to get important things done without digging in and demanding ideological correctness. Fat chance on that.
   

If You've Got It. You Can Learn How To Use It.

       Well, now they've done it. Now you can go to Harvard University and you can take a course in how to take advantage of your privileges. That is to say, if you or your family is well connected, this course will help you to learn how to take advantage of these privileges. Apparently there is no course on how to get by without these privileges. I suppose that at Harvard, it's assumed you are of privilege.
       Just how important is it to teach young people from wealthy, well connected families, how to use those connections to their best interests? But again, if you happen to be a student at Harvard and aren't from a wealthy, well connected, family, it's just your tough luck. Perhaps it's a way of telling poorer students that they shouldn't be there in the first place. Now to be fair, I can't honestly state there is no such course for poorer students. But there was no mention of such a course in the article I read.
       The question I have is; how necessary is it to teach children of privilege how to take advantage of privilege? Haven't they already learned that as a child with far more expensive gifts at birthdays and Christmas and more of them? Didn't they learn it at the private prep schools they attended. Or the "shoe in" acceptance at the best colleges in the country? Exactly who is it that thinks these kids don't already know they're privileged, or how best put those privileges to work on their behalf?
       The folks who really need this kind of course are the kids who don't have privilege and need to learn how to develop connections that will help them to succeed in life. When Harvard and other schools start offering that kind of course, then they'll be doing a service for society. But then I guess doing a service for society isn't what they're in business for. It seems the reason for Harvard's existence is to help the already privileged to become privileged in their own right.
       I suppose there is good reason for that training. After all, daddy isn't gonna live forever. Although at 15% tax on estates, most of his fortune will.

Why Do We Think It's Not Our Fault?

       Why is it that we all have our garbage and trash picked up at the curb and hauled off to a landfill, and pay for that service? Why is it that we're all connected to a sewer line to get rid of our waste and pay for that service, or spend the money to construct our own, on site, sewer system? We pretty much take these things for granted. We could cut down on the need for sewers and garbage collection if we conserved more, but we'd still need to use these services somewhat.
       But why is it that when it comes to our waste and pollution of our air and water, we're not willing to pay for the waste that causes those pollutants? When it comes to cleaning up our own mess in these areas, we sit there and claim it "wasn't me" that caused it. Why does it matter if it was you or I or someone else? Doesn't the mess still have to be cleaned up? Don't we still need clean air and water?       
       Now I understand some folks still refuse to believe in the science of climate change and the idea that we humans are to blame for much of the problem. What I don't understand is why, just on the off chance that the 97% of scientists might be right, why we don't all accept this as a problem we should address. Even on the off chance there's no human responsibility for the warming or if there's no warming, what would be the harm in introducing measures to clean up our act?
       I also understand the confusion over the costs of fighting climate change, but those costs would be outweighed by the new jobs in new industries coming into existence to offset that global warming. I'll bet the concerns have more to do with plain old fashioned politics than with any science. The funny part of it is that the party that's fighting against climate science is the same party that led the way, some few years ago. What caused them to change? I'll bet they think it cost them an election once? Now isn't that silly? I mean, taking a chance on killing all of us off over an election?

Why Were They Great?

       There's a book out about the four freedoms of everyone. It's titled THE FIGHT FOR FOUR FREEDOMS "What made FDR and the Greatest Generation truly great." The four freedom it talks about are Freedom from want and fear, and freedom of speech and religion. Neither our Congress nor our Supreme Court have been of great help in these matters of late.  It's a book I want to read.
       But it also got me to thinking about some thoughts I've had lately about the Greatest Generation. The Greatest Generation became great because of it's steadfast opposition to the Axes powers and won World War II. But it also became the Greatest Generation because of the GI Bill. It allowed any veteran who wanted to, to go to college for free.
       What that meant is that America became blessed with a great abundance of well educated men and women who drove the engines of industry that made America the Greatest Nation in the industrialized world. But without that educated generation we might not have reached the heights we did. And that's what I see as the greatest danger to our society and economy. That's because a college education is quickly becoming unaffordable to the average young person today.
       Except for the children of the wealthy, those who do finish college are so laden with debt, they will be years paying off those loans. There are far too many who, having started school, find it necessary to drop out for financial reasons, or never even try to go to school. Unfortunately in todays economy an untrained or undereducated person finds employment opportunities severely limited.
       The time has come for America to look into the possibilities of post high school education being free, just like it was for so many of the greatest generation. We just might find it would give America the same kind of lift it gave to the post WWII veterans. We need to do something other than argue among ourselves as to which party is correct and which isn't. Because that isn't getting us anywhere.
Why not give our young people a chance to prove they too can be great.

What Is A Hedge Fund Manager?

       Did you hear about the top 25 hedge fund managers last year? What's that, you don't care? Well, did you know that each of these 25 men made more than all the kindergarten teachers in the country combined? That they made over $21 billion between themselves? You do know that the average income for each of these guys is more than you and your extended family will make in a lifetime, don't you? That is, unless you happen to be one of these guys.
       The good part is that they pay less in taxes than you do. And don't let anyone try to convince you that these guys are job creators. They're about as far from being job creators as the pizza delivery boy is. The only jobs they might create is their own personal maids and groundskeepers and chauffeurs. which doesn't amount to a whole lot of new positions.
       Ya know what they do? They get paid fees for suggesting what stocks or companies or commodities to buy or sell for their customer funds. Then for some unknown reason, they get to claim those fees are capital gains. The thing is, using that tangled route to taxation, the money you earn working 40 hours a week doing plumbing work could also be defined as capital gains. After all the money you earn is in fact capital, and since you gained that much capital on payday, it is therefore capital gains. The difference is that the gains in capital you had is taxed at somewhere near 35% while these guys pay somewhere near $15%.
       But look at it this way. If you earn $50,000 per year, it would take you 17 million years to equal what these guys earn in one year. For the good of the country, how important is it for these guys to earn this much money? What if we raised their taxes from 15% to 35%? What would that mean? It means their taxes would go from $3,750 billion to $7.365 billion. But that would still leave them with over $13 billion and a half to live on. Don't you think America could find a use for the additional $3.715 billion? Still, each would have about $10,500,000 per week to live on. I'll bet they could scrape by on that.
P.S. My brother-in-law suggests a better title for these folks would be Hedge-Hog.

When Smart Guns Are Smarter Than You.

        Did you happen to notice all the hullabaloo over a couple of gun stores offering to sell a new "smart" gun? It seems that the  gun lobbies and NRA and gun rights enthusiasts and 2nd amendment freedom fighters really got stirred up over such a horrible attack on their rights. You got it, the folks who demand the right to have guns are dead set against guns. The safe kind.
       Apparently the right to keep and bare arms applies only to firearms that can be fired by anyone, including small children who find them in closets or under beds or criminals who steal them. But guns that are made to make it impossible for those children or those criminals to use them are contrary to that 2nd amendment and a grave danger to those rights to own and carry firearms.
       My understanding is that by allowing these guns to be sold, our government can somehow deny anyone and everyone from owning any firearms at all. Or that the government can somehow keep a registry of gun owners because of these guns, though I'm not sure how these guns alone can accomplish that.
       But there must be some way for these "smart" guns to do all this damage to our rights, because the two gun shop owners who had decided to sell these "smart" guns, one in California and one in Maryland, have received threats against their stores and their lives by a large number of irate citizens and the NRA (notice, the NRA is the bullying lobby of the gun manufacturers association).
       So what we have here is the folks who care most deeply about our right to keep and bare arms, only want us to keep and bare the arms they alone approve of. And when it comes to any gun that's smarter than them, they definitely do not approve. And that makes all the sense in the world if your world is smaller than a mustard seed.

The Fraud Was Not With The Voters

       With all the other important stuff happening, like the ring George Clooney gave his fiancée or how long soldiers can have their hair or the fact that GIs can't have tattoos, you may have missed the fact that the Supreme Court got one right for a change. That is to say, the justices saw through a number of states' attempts to limit voting rights for the purpose of gaining voting advantages for their party. What caught these states was the fact that the phony reason for the limiting of voter rights to eliminate voter fraud, was in fact a fraud.
       The states in question could not show a single case of voter fraud that their laws would have prevented. But the laws would have prevented thousands of legitimate voters from exercising their rights. So, okay, what does it all mean? It means that about 20 or so states that had similar laws are done for. Not the states, but those laws are history in all but name. They'll all be taken to court and reversed, and good riddance.
       These laws were and are transparently anti-minority, anti-Democratic and completely unfair. Look at Pennsylvania for further proof, where the speaker of the Republican led house stated publically that it's law made it possible for Romney to win the state. Fortunately a state Appeals Court justice struck it down before the 2012 election.
       What America needs most is some way to get more people to vote in elections, not fewer. When elections are decided by subterfuge rather than majority votes, we lose the last vestige of freedom we have. We can little afford to give up this last opportunity to exercise that freedom by allowing money and power to engineer elections in their favor.