Much talk among Democratic presidential hopefuls circles around income inequality and the poor. Their solution: tax the wealthy to death and the middle class out of the middle class in order to pay for free everything for the “poor.”
But they fail to realize, or choose not to admit to, a number of interesting truths. The top 1% of Americans already pay 37.32% of all federal income taxes the government collects. The bottom 50% of Americans pay only 3.04%. So the “wealthy” are already paying way more than their fair share of taxes. As Mitt Romney famously pointed out during his run for president in 2012, the percentage of taxes paid by that bottom 50% is so low because the majority of them pay no taxes at all.
The gap between the rich and the poor has increased greatly, to be true, but what the Democrats won’t admit to is that no class remains static for long. Young workers, just out of school may be in jobs that pay a starting salary that falls within the category of “poor.” People in the wealthy or middle classes go bankrupt and may fall into the poor class.
“A 1995 study reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas followed 3,725 currently “poor” citizens for 17 years. To generalize from the study, only 1 out of 20 “poor” Americans remained poor. Thirteen percent had become “middle class,” and six had become “rich,” defined by reaching the top 20% of income producers” (Paulson, Terry. “The American Dream is Still Alive).
A study by the Treasury Department found that roughly half of all “poor” moved out of poverty between 1996 and 2005 while at the same time, many “wealthy” lost as much as half of their incomes (Paulson).
Cornell’s Thomas Hirschl looked at 44 years of income data and found that while over half of all Americans were in poverty or near poverty at some point between the ages of 25 and 60, 73% of all Americans spent at least a year among the top 20% of wage earners. Circumstances change for people: entry level jobs, illness, bad business investments can send people’s income plummeting as can poor education or a stubborn reliance upon governmental support. Welfare was intended as a safety net, not as a way of life, as many Democrats encourage.
Just as income can fall, so, studies have shown, it rises. People complete education or training courses and obtain higher paying jobs, they make wise investments, they earn higher wages as they spend more years with a company, they create new things that the public is willing to buy. The American Dream, as Terry Paulson contends, is still very much alive in America for those who truly want to achieve it.
At the same time, roadblocks are constantly put in the way of some of the poorest Americans. Teachers’ unions, who once protected teachers from administrators who gave higher salaries to their favorites or fired teachers whose ideas they disagreed with, now “protect” incompetent teachers in failing inner-city schools by buying the support of mostly Democratic politicians to keep school choice out of their states. Children, who could be bussed to safe, excellent schools in the suburbs, are left to languish in drug and gang-ridden schools where little in the way of education goes on, robbing them of a future. Thus they grow up on welfare, walking to and from school on streets where gang violence often kills one of them by accident, and as adults, slide easily into the same welfare state as their mothers. Welfare is notoriously anti-marriage, often reducing benefits if a family has both a mother and father in the home. I had a friend who stubbornly found himself a job, even though he admitted that it cost his family in reduced welfare benefits and “food stamps.” In addition, many young black men, the products of the failed schools or victims of the drug culture, are not equipped to find and hold a decent paying job. For these individuals, an education and/or technical training to enable them to qualify for a job is the true answer. Free everything only removes the incentive to work.
The American Dream is one in which those who are willing to work hard can and will succeed. It is not a system in which the government takes money from those who are providing jobs in order to give it to those who are not working. Captain John Smith, who was vital to the survival of the Jamestown colony, famously gave the order: “He that will not work shall not eat” (“Jamestown Rediscovery”). Without the work of all of the early settlers, colonies could not have survived and the United States would not exist.
Thus began in the United States what is often called “the Protestant work ethic,” an idea whose origin was in Europe. Martin Luther claimed that hard work was no less holy than the duties carried out by priests in a church. The Calvinists envisioned hard work as a way of fulfilling one’s duty to God. John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist Church advised, “If those who gain all they can and save all they can will likewise give all they can, then the more they gain, the more they will grow in grace and the more treasure they will lay up in heaven.” This “ethic” gave rise to capitalism, both in Europe, and in the United States, and through capitalism, prosperity. Wesley’s advice is perhaps what leads in part to the fact that Conservatives, particularly Evangelical Christians, give far more to charity (beyond church giving) than their more liberal fellow citizens. But it also produced the American Dream which has raised millions from poverty and is still raising those willing and equipped to work. Ben Carson grew up in a slum, poor and disadvantaged, yet he became a famous neuro-surgeon, a presidential candidate, and now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Success and the American Dream are still alive and well, if only a Democratic president doesn’t kill them.