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.