Redistributing Income

McCain accuses Obama of trying to redistribute income. The Republicans have been redistributing income to the wealthy since at least the Reagan era. When I was young the top income rate was 90%, estate taxes were very high, and capital gain taxes were high too. Perhaps these were too high, but over the years huge tax cuts for the wealthy has helped the rich get richer while the working men and women are getting poorer.

Stock options, bonuses, and high salaries for the top executives has severely affected the ratio of the working man's salary to the CEO's income. In Europe this has been a much watched ratio but not in this country.

Some years ago, J. Paul Getty made news when he was the first billionaire. Now to make Fortune's list of the richest 440 in our country, you have to earn over 4 times that figure. To top the list, you have to make $30-40 billion dollars.

The Bible teaches us that those who are blessed with the most have the duty to help the most. A rich young man was told to give all he had to the poor. Carnegie set out to die a poor man. He could not take it with him and his children did not need his huge wealth. He gave it away. Some others do take this seriously but many on the Fortune list are second generation rich, living off their father's brilliance and hard work.

Republicans love to give big tax cuts to the rich for the rich support them. The GOP says this will all trickle down to the poor. The current economic mess shows that this has not worked. Instead the middle class and their grand-children and great-grandchildren will have to pay for all these expensive "fixes" for the economic games and gambles the rich did. The GOP says they want balanced budgets but Bush has doubled the national debt in 7 1/2 short years-before all the economic cures of recent months. Six of those years he had Republican control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.