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After all these years I recognize that you have a heartfelt compassion for the poor but also a tremendous resentment towards the wealthy. Sorry to have brought you such bad news in that there are highly paid individuals.

Is getting all you can a societal good? Evidently conservatives think so, even if it means paying those who work hard for minimum wage a wage that is far below a living wage. I think shareholders have a responsibility, but I wonder how many of us are shareholders in these companies through pension boards of the various Baptist entities. I wonder if our boards look at the ethics of the companies in which our money is invested other than being certain they don't own alcoholic beverage and tobacco stocks.

I have trouble figuring out what kind of work one person can do that merits that kind of pay. There's only so much expertise and creativity that a single human being can have.

Of course, there is a Biblical, Christian statement about the love of money being the root of all evil. This is a great illustration of that principle. Of course, conservatives conveniently ignore the Bible when it doesn't support their view of the way things are. It only becomes imposed when it fits their agenda. When it doesn't then you get some answer about how the world isn't necessarily bound by its moral perspective.

My income redistributionist friends do realize that most of the large CEO pay is from stock? Meaning that millions of shareholders benefit?

Not that it makes any difference to the soak the rich crowd.

...and we need gummit to unsquirrel all that money and put it into vast porkulous programs and hordes of new, non-productive bureaucrats?

My ThM thesis is titled The Ethics of the Guaranteed Annual Income. It looks at the idea indorsed by Robert Thoebald, a liberal and Milton Friedman, a conservative. In its simplest form, GAI proposed to give individuals living alone and families a basic income sufficient to meet basic needs-housing, food, clothing etc. In several European countries which have accepted GAI as the structure for those in poverty, the average length of a GAI grant is five years. People want to be self sufficient. They take the GAI use it to improve their situation. Whey they do not need it anymore, they leave the program. The chronic poverty rate hovers around 5%.

If the rich could see their way clear to help pay for such a program here in the good old USA, we could perhaps eliminate 95% of poverty, get our economic situation in balance and see the DOW at 5,000. The rich would be even richer than they are now and no one would care, because we would all be doing well enough.

We already have a hybrid of the GAI/negative income tax in the EIC. Fraud is a problem with the latter, of course. If the program is added on top of existing welfare and in-kind payments then it makes much less sense. I have no doubt that liberals would be happy to tax the wealthy to transfer to lower Y people regardless of existing welfare programs.

If a GAI could replace all existing welfare and the like it would probably have my support, but then the poverty bureaucracy would be out of jobs.

William, that's the idea. Replace the whole system. Needy people get the money. We could and probably should offer training programs like budget management to the poor, but no more trying to moralize them before they get their money. No visits the single mother to see if there is a pair of men's shoes in the closet and no Phd. in Home Ec running around all over town in her fancy car pricing loss leaders at every grocery store to figure out how much it cost to feed a person. The genius that did this never did figure how a person who's only transportation was her own two feet could shop anywhere else but the ghetto grocery store where prices were much higher (Ohio plan). Under GAI, the people get the money and that's all. How they spend it is up to them.

As an aside, consider this. Give each vet a gold health card. With it let him get care from where ever he or she needs it and shut down the **** VA. Bills would go to medicare. It would not take long for the civilian health system to adapt and add the specialties greatly needed by our vets. We support our wars. We have not supported them since WWII/Korea. In our modern wars, soldiers have crystallized as the toys of politicians send them anywhere anytime on any whim and when they break throw them away.

Privatize VA? Heresy! As it is we get to see where single payer would go.

What we're living under in this country now is an economic system that feeds greed. It is unfortunate that conservatives, who have managed to pull in a large segment of people who claim to believe in Jesus, do not recognize what is happening. Even after the abject failure of Ronald Reagan's economic policies, with its "trickle down" theories that has essentially led to the two worst post-depression recessions we've experienced, they still seem to think that they're going to get some of it. But the caving in of evangelical conservatives on principle, especially when money is involved, is a predictable pattern.