Don't Soak the Rich

The rich are different from you and me. They are swine.

So say many of the Democrats in the House of Representatives who would rather that jobless people lose their unemployment checks and middle-class people lose their income tax breaks than that the rich get a dime extra.

Some Democrats hate the rich. Most Americans, on the other hand, would like to become the rich.

Barack Obama understands this. Having grown up poor, he is today worth about $5 million, chiefly from writing books.

Americans do not resent their presidents for being wealthy. Of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln — three are among our top five wealthiest presidents.

Washington had a net worth of $525 million. Jefferson was worth $212 million, and Roosevelt $125 million. (Lincoln was worth less than a million.) Our richest president was John F. Kennedy, worth about $1 billion. The fifth-richest president was the "friend of the common man" Andrew Jackson, who was worth $119 million. (These figures, taken from the Atlantic in May, measure wealth in today's dollars.)

All of these presidents were pretty popular, ordinary folks not holding their wealth against them. Today, however, things are different.

Congressional Democrats want us to hate the rich for being rich.

To me, this flies in the face of the American dream, which is to work hard, play by the rules, save your money and marry wealthy. As a kid, I dreamed about being adopted by a rich family. My father was a truck driver, and my mother was a housewife, and this seemed the quickest route.

It was not to be, however. But I never resented the rich. On weekends, my father used to take the family on drives through wealthy neighborhoods — I am not making this up — so we could ogle the homes of the affluent.

When the '60s rolled around, I didn't want to burn down the homes of the rich, I wanted to live in them. (It was OK with me if they stayed. I would have been happy with just an oak-paneled den and a color TV.)

Again, it was not to be. I went to college at a time when wealth was not fashionable and got a degree in English literature so I could read about men and women who led lives even more miserable than my own.

I got a job and slowly, without my much noticing it, I put money in the bank every week, and a small amount of money accumulated.

I bought a black-and-white TV and a used Fiat 850 Spyder. (They were about the same size.) And I began hearing about things like IRAs and certificates of deposit, which seemed like a pretty good deal.

I paid taxes, but I never went crazy with resentment over them. I was not pleased that my taxes were being used to fund the Vietnam War, but I was pleased that they were being used to fund the Peace Corps and VISTA.

Interest accrued. I bought a color TV that had a remote control, and I traded in the used Fiat for a new Toyota because I learned that Toyotas ran during all four seasons. Every now and then, I would see people driving Mercedes and BMWs and Jaguars. I knew they were probably driving to large, nice homes, rather than the small apartment where I lived.

But I never resented that. Which is why class warfare doesn't work in America and why congressional Democrats are being stupid. In America, the class structure is fluid. You don't have to stay in the economic class into which you were born. People don't really hate the rich, and we don't really want to confiscate their wealth.

Only half of the wealthiest people in America inherited their wealth. The rest earned it. But earned or inherited, I just want them to pay their fair share of taxes, not some kind of punitive share.

And if the price of my middle-class tax break and continued unemployment benefits for the jobless is a tax break for the wealthy, well, I can live with that. As can President Obama.

The only people who can't are legislators who are posturing for the cameras and proving what we all know: Congress is a virtually dysfunctional institution, torn asunder by hyper-partisanship and a demented degree of yearning on the part of incumbents to get re-elected.

So it is fashionable with some on Capitol Hill to hate the rich. Until election time, when they would like the rich to bundle money for them. Then the rich are just swell.

Yes, the gap between rich and poor is growing in this country, and too small a percentage of the population owns too much of the wealth.

Don't like the way wealth is distributed in the country? Then you can join the congressional Democrats and grump about it, or you can go out and get some wealth for yourself.

I am not saying people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Some people don't have bootstraps.

But I am saying that when a compromise comes along that benefits the poor, the middle class and, yes, the rich, we ought to go for it. The guys on Mount Rushmore would understand.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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