Shrinking the wealth gap between the rich and the poor was one of President Obama's themes during his State of the Union address. Indeed, it has been one of the main themes of his presidency. The Republicans almost surely will buy into it, and thus fight the upcoming campaign on his terms. And, very likely, will lose the election because of it.
I'm going to state it right now, up front, in this article: I do not give a royal, rotten fig if the income gap between the rich and poor shrinks or not. That is bogus, it's a red herring, it shouldn't be the issue, it's not what the country ought to be trying to do. Creating wealth should be the goal, for the more of it there is, the more there will be for everyone to have. And even if the "top 1%" have an inceasing percentage of it, what difference does that make if there is more availabe for the 99% to enjoy? That's the key. The Democratic Party used to know that because it was John F. Kennedy who said, "a rising tide lifts all boats."
But that was before Marxism became the central economic mantra of the tyrants of the Democratic Party. And so far, only Newt Gingrich has shown the least bit of ability to counter it. And he hasn't done a very good job of it.
Let me explain how it works--and it does work because history has proven so--and I will try to keep it as simple as possible. Let's suppose we have 100 people and $1,000,000. One person, I will call him Mr. Filthy Greedy Rich to appease my Marxist readers, owns 90% of it, $900,000, and the other 99 have only $100,000 (10%) among them. But, because Mr. Filthy Greedy Rich is filthy, greedy, and rich, he wants more. There's two ways he can do it. He can try to rob the other 99 people, but even if successful, he will end up with only $1,000,000. That hasn't accomplished much, and everybody knows he has an endless, unbounded lust to obtain as much as possible. No, if he is wise, he will try to create more wealth for himself to enjoy. So, what does he do? He starts a business and hires the other 99 people to work for him. In time, by producing goods and services that the 99 other people want (and he will have to pay them enough so that they can afford those goods and services), total wealth is increased to $5,000,000. (For those who don't know, I'll demonstrate, in some future article, how wealth is created.) Now, suppose that Mr. Filthy Greedy Rich still owns 90% of all the wealth. 90% of 5 million is 4.5 million. That means the other 99 now have $500,000 to share among themselves! Everybody is getting richer. The gap between rich and "poor" has widened, but everybody is better off and only Mr. Filthy, Greedy Poor Person will complain about it. But he'll only complain about it if some demogogue tells him that "the income gap is widening". "The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer!" No, they aren't. In capitalism, if government by and large stays out of economic development, everybody gets richer. It's just that some get richer faster than others ("rich," of course, is a very relative term). That's how the poverty rate went from about 95% before the capitalistic Industrial Revolution to about 10% in modern times, and has only been rising again in recent years because Barack Obama and the Democrats have got businesses scared to death to invest and provide the jobs that are necessary to lift people out of poverty.
But, of course, lifting people out of poverty is the last thing the left wants to do.
For poor people to get out of poverty--and stay out of it--they have to work. And, of course, that is exactly what countless hundreds of millions of people have done in the last 200 years. But in order to work, they must have skills that will induce someone to hire them. Very, very few people are born Michael Jordan or Ludwig van Beethoven. Skills are learned, developed, and honed over time. That's why people in their 40s and 50s make more money than teenagers; the latter don't have any skills that would cause an employer to pay them $50,000 a year. They have to learn those skills, and that's what made Newt Gingrich's response to Juan Williams last week so pertinent. Let the children in the schools take over some of the janitorial tasks. Let them learn to be someplace on time, to acccept some responsibility, to develop some sense of pride and self-worth that only successful work can produce. It was an absolutely brilliant scheme by Gingrich, but of course, the poverty pimps and race demogogues in the country had a wall-eyed fit. As I have said before, liberals don't want the poor to work, in fact, they want more poor. They aren't going to say that, of course, but all you have to do is look at what they do. They want more poor because the more poor there are, the more people there will be dependent on government. When people rise out of poverty and start taking care of themselves, they don't need much government and they certainly won't need liberals (about the only thing people would need government for is to protect them from liberals, i.e., the fruits of liberal economic and moral theory). Creating wealth, creating moral,industrious, frugal, self-disciplined people, creating people who can take care of themselves destroys modern liberalism! The reader must grasp this point: Barack Obama, from his standpoint, has been an eminently successful President because he has swelled the rolls of those who are getting government assistance; the figure is almost 50% of the population now. And once that figure gets above 50%--when the majority becomes dependent upon government--Obama and the Democrats will have won, for good. And the United States, as envisioned by its Founders and the millions of men who gave their lives in defense of it, will no longer exist.
So, the theme of the upcoming campaign will be, as always with the Democrats, class warfare. Divide the country. Create bitterness and hatred against those who have been successful. Cheer the riots in the streets. Call as many names as possible, throw as much mud as you can, immediately try to destroy any perceived threat. And give Barack Obama and the Democrats the power to shrink the gap between rich and poor in the only way they know how--steal from the rich and give to the poor. It will create fewer rich, of course, and eventually, it will create more poor. Because if you don't give Mr. Filthy Greedy Rich the incentive to produce more wealth, eventually there won't be any to take. And we'll all be poor.
But we'll all be equal.