One of the great things about the United States is that people on the bottom of the income ladder aspire to climb the rungs, and many who make the trip get to the top. To reach to the highest rung, you don't even need a high school education, let alone college. You just need guts and gumption. All of us know this on some core level. Even people overseas know it — whether they're Muslims, Jews, Christians or atheists — and that is why they line up to come to this country.
I've been alive for 72 years and have never — until this year and last — heard a U.S. president seem to foment class warfare. The way President Obama is talking now suggests that the bottom income folks should overthrow the top income ones. And no, not by actually throwing the bums out of office, since most of the men and women who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps don't hold office. This overthrow is more about taxing them more.
Of course, the president knows that the rich already pay w-a-a-y most of the tax in this country. This is just his rant to help portray Mitt Romney, who looks more and more like the possible Republican lottery winner (it has been a long campaign already), as a member of the out-of-touch, rich elite. He seems even willing to try to actually stir-up some sort of movement against the rich. Most of the rich are not rich by inheritance; they are rich by dint of hard work.
Naturally, the media are leaping on the bandwagon. You have to laugh, right? One morning anchor, thought to make $17 million yearly, reports with compassion about President Obama's bitching about the rich. The anchor doesn't actually say the rich are bad, but you get the idea that the working poor and the unemployed are the good guys. We taxpayers are bad, and God help us if we are successful. In fact, most TV news personalities are super rich, and yet they are the most likely to attack the hard-working business owners en masse, folks who make far less than Lauer or any of the "60 Minutes" or "20/20" folks.
