Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Spreading the Wealth...


















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A humorous anecdote from P-Mac via email:
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"Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read "Vote Obama, I need the money." I laughed.Once in the restaurant my server had on a "Obama 08" tie, again I laughed as he had given away his political preference--just imagine the coincidence.
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"When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept.
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"He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need — the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.
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"I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.
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"At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient needed money more.
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"I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application."
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H/T to P-Mac

4 comments:

Uncle Joe said...

The sheeple think they are the ones who will be the handee instead of the hander. If Obama wins, Obama will suck workers' bank accounts dry and then he will turn on the U.S. military budget and rape it.

JMK said...

Bottomline, only a distinct minority of people around today and voting lived through the Carter years as adults.

The rest have come to take the prosperity of the past quarter century for granted.

Dumb people do dumb things and have to learn from their own mistakes....I just hate that so many smarter people will be out-voted and have to suffer along with them.

Unknown said...

Spreading the Wealth coaches work with individuals and families from the ground up, teaching our students financial common sense and discipline.The result of policies advocated by those who favor spreading the wealth around.

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JMK said...

"Spreading the Wealth coaches work with individuals and families from the ground up..." (Neal)
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Well, that's somewhat simplistic, although perhaps it's that your didn't post your full argument.

"Spreading the wealth," can be different than "government redistribution," but all too often isn't.

Most of our traditional "anti-poverty programs" have been redistributionist in nature and they've had a horrific impact, both socially and economically.

First, they mired people in perpetual poverty, by, in effect, rewarding sloth by sustaining it without a demanding social contract and they were disastrous economically because they took money from productive working people to pay for a veritable "guaranteed income" for the reckless, irresponsible and non-productive poor. That not only incentivized sloth on the one end, it deincentivized work at the other end.

There's been no good outcome from such programs at all.

They didn't "elevate people" formerly trapped in poverty, they merely cemented them into government-dependence.

Even in the private sector, where some "sharing of the wealth (dividends are one example of sharing the profits with shareholders), BUT what about a plan that would seek to "equalize pay rates across differing positions," justified by the call to "decrease the prevalent disparities in wealth?"

That wouldn't be a good thing at all!

Rather than incentivize "those at the bottom," it would merely DE-INCENTIVIZE those whose skills are much more rare and difficult to master.

Why become an engineer if you can make nearly the same income as a janitor?

Why put in all those 16 hour days to become a VP, when you could make almost the same income doing the minimum and remaining a perpetual staffer?

I get the impression that we may not entirely disagree. Sometimes it's a failure to define our terms properly that leads to some degree of miscommunication.

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