It's fashionable nowadays here on DKos to blame a group of people that, for want of a better title, are being called "the rich".
As usual, people here and in the United States in general are ignoring the real cause of the problem. The problem is a lack of money, MONEY.
So now we're going to tax "the rich" and all our problems will be over.
Guess what? As long as you keep ignoring the real problem, no amount of taxing anybody will solve it.
But there's something else about "the rich" and about the REAL problem that you may not know, or choose to ignore.
You like hospitals? They're usually founded by "the rich". Go into any hospital in any big city, and you'll find a plaque on the wall with a list of donors. Those donors aren't poor people; they are rich people who want to help the community. Oh, sure; they're probably getting a good tax break for that. Would you prefer that they didn't underwrite the new CAT scan machine, the new premature baby nursery, the cancer research lab? You think the government is going to build those? The government is not in the healthcare business. The United States government spends less on healthcare than almost any other industrialized country, Including our two neighbors to the North and South. And there's a lot of lawmakers that would like to spend absolutely nothing, and look at people who need help with health care in these difficult times as "lazy people who don't want to find a job".
Let's talk about culture. Museums? Founded and supported by "the rich". Symphonies? Civic organizations? All the things that make life worth living, such as the arts, a lot of the sciences, all of those things are very often founded and supported by "the rich". Parks? Right here in this town I can think of six parks named for the prominent rich people who donated them to the city. The government is not in the business of supporting the arts, and they're trying to sell off our parks. Here in California, our governor tried to close a bunch of parks; it was only public outcry that stopped him from doing that. The United States spends less on the arts than almost any industrialized country.
Education? Go to any university and you'll find chairs endowed by rich individuals. It's not the government that funds these, unless it's research for the military industrial complex. And by the way, that research does not benefit any of us; it benefits our continuing military illusion which we are addicted to and saddled with. meanwhile, our educational system is slipping fast behind most other countries, and most doctors and interns, for instance, are coming from countries such as India and other countries who have much better education than we do, and who honor educated people who can contribute to improving society, unlike the United States, where our present state of education is going down the drain fast, helped along by a general anti-intellectual bias and politicians who are only too happy to cater to tea party ignoramuses.
So is the problem really "the rich"? Well, maybe some of them; I'm talking about an ex vice-president whose profits from the Iraq war, thanks to his erstwhile position in the company that is the biggest supplier to our military, is somewhere short of $1 billion. I'm talking about military suppliers who become extremely rich selling gasoline for $100 a gallon to our troops in Afghanistan, and specifically a company whose name starts with B. and ends with P. I'm talking about the military-industrial complex, whose influence and companies are spread throughout the United States, so that the politicians in every state and district are afraid to cut any military spending, for fear of losing jobs in their voting block. And of course I'm talking about politicians, both Republican and Democrat, who constantly vote for the useless wars that we fight.
Money? You want money? Read this:
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes have estimated that the long-term costs of the war in Iraq – taking into account the costs of taking care of wounded soldiers and rebuilding the military – will ultimately cost three trillion dollars.
That's $3,000,000,000,000.
There is the money. Money that will never be spent on what we really need; on rebuilding our infrastructure, our educational system, and our energy system. $3 trillion; gone, gone, wasted, never to be spent on us. On our country, on our citizenry, our health, and the real problems that confront us as a nation.
Compared to that, taxing "the rich" is like a fart in a hurricane, a shiny thing to distract the sheep, a bone to toss to the dogs to distract them from the real problem, the problem of our continued addiction to so-called "defense", which really doesn't defend us, but only fills the wallets of certain people, and the politicians who aid and abet them.
Peace, love, prosperity; I hope to see the day that the people here on DKos and in the United States in general realize that these three go hand-in-hand.