Grace, I don't think everyone's going to be as lucky/determined/intellligent as you ...
Well there is the crux of the issue, you give to the poor because you don't think they are capable of making it on their own. Call it "lucky, smart or determined" but really what you are doing is being condescending to them.
I have another friend who makes the same argument with me all the time. In fact, what is humorous is that she argued this once at dinner, sitting there with my husband who is tenth of ten children and whose father died when he was a month old (I don't know how they ate, but they did). Also there was her husband who was the eldest child in poor working class household with an absent alcoholic father and whose mother made ends meet cleaning houses. And then, of course, me, who grew up in children's homes and foster homes in the bowels of New Jersey. We are, all three of us, very successful in life. Living proof sitting at the table that the US offers an enormous degree of social mobility.
While, she, on the other hand, grew up in a wealthy family, went to an Ivy League school and was the least successful person at the table from both a professional stand point and a monetary one. I told her that she had grown up with a considerable disadvantage in comparison to the three of us, she wasn't offered a sufficient degree of adversity to overcome in life therefore she never developed the means with which to feel confident and secure enough to really advance.
My very first jobs were cleaning rich people's houses. How lucky or smart do you have to be to clean someone else's toilet? What I discovered through working for rich people was that they weren't any smarter than I was and that I was capable of doing pretty much any job they could. What was most important was I discovered (aside from the fact that rich people weren't any happier) was that if I was going to be successful, I had to stop resenting them for whatever apparent advantage they were handed because for the most part that "advantage" can frequently turn into a liability the same way my "disadvantage" become an advantage. The reason this is so is because when people have things that they themselves feel they haven't earned, it makes them feel as if they don't deserve what they have.
This is how poor people feel when they are handed charity, the person who does the giving feels great and the person on the receiving end feels like a lessor human. It's why they so frequently bite the hand that feeds. OTOH a pay check for a job well done feels pretty damned good. Even back in the days when I was cleaning houses and was paid a pittance, it felt good to get paid for the work I did, it was what made me equal to my employer. I gave them work and they gave me money and in the end, we owed each other nothing.
As to taxation levels, somewhere around 50%, assuming I'm on the winning side of things.
What is the winning side? The top half? The top half of all income tax filers in 2001 started at an adjusted gross of around 28K and makes just under $16 bucks an hour. So you think it's OK to take half of that for government services? You keep eight bucks and they get eight bucks?
Even the old Mafia used to let the poor saps they shook down for protection money keep more than that. |
