re: #73 jamesfirecat

This really struck in my craw so let me go one step further.

Dark this quote is not about people like Henry Ford who managed to come from effectively nowhere to become rich.

This quote is about people who are lower class and are going to stay lower class for their entire lives barring some freak event like winning the lottery, people like that who demand the government cut back on taxes for the rich and reducing how much the government spends on supporting the poor, people who are not willing to admit that they themselves are poor but instead want to grease the wheels to make it easier for the rich to gain even more power just because they want to imagine they are rich themselves.

It all goes back to stuff like this….

[Link: pollposition.com…]

Where 13 percent of people say they are in the top 1%

They are not willing to face the reality of their own fiscal situation.

This isn’t just limited to people with below-median income or wealth. You have to be very far up the financial food chain indeed before you can be self sufficient for income and medical expenses in old age (i.e., assuming no SS or Medicare). Without Social Security and Medicare, damn near 100% of senior citizens are looking at abject poverty at some point, plus dying early for lack of ability to pay for medical care.

On a slightly different note, I still remember with wonderment a conversation I had with a libertarian while we were both still in grad school. He wasn’t worried about health care expenses, since once one has $10,000,000 or so in the bank, health care is basically pocket change.