re: #159 Big Steve

Exactly. What really drove this home for me was when my wife was applying to medical school. All told, the application and preparation process, including taking classes before the MCATs, airfare to interviews, getting transcripts, taking a few summer classes to boost GPA— cost about fourteen thousand dollars.

There is no way a person from a struggling, poor family could afford to apply to as many schools as she did, and have as good a chance as getting into a good program as she did. They’d have to set their sights lower, and apply to just a couple of schools that seemed likely to take them, not take the classes before the MCATS, not boost their GPA.

And because they would have to apply to fewer schools, their overall chance of not getting in— and of all that money being wasted— would be much higher. We could have afforded her not getting in; it would have sucked, but we would have dealt with it. A poor person couldn’t.

What is my point? Money is useful for opportunities. Poor people can’t pursue their dreams as effectively as a wealthy person can. They can’t take a risk on a dream job. They can’t fly to another state for an interview. They can’t take classes to cross-train.

I am sure you’re a decent person who ‘deserves’ all the money he’s got— but this isn’t about ‘deserves’. We all know people who ‘deserve’ to trip over a briefcase full of cash tomorrow morning.

What this is about is keeping our nation strong and our society stable, and it will not last if we continue to have the growth in wealth disparity that we do.

And I do wish that we could use a surgeon’s scalpel, and only tax people who make money in craptastic ways— but that opens a whole ‘nother can of worms.