A Little Bit of Arithmetic

As the ground swell of protests continues to build in favor of increased taxes on the millionaires and billionaires, some (most notably on the Right of the political spectrum) continue to blame the poor for so many of our problems in this country. The Right continues to argue that the poor game the system, take advantage of lax oversight laws and are the thieves taking so much of the hard-earned money from the middle class. In light of the Great Recession, one should be inclined to think such an argument ridiculous, but still some continue to shout angrily that it's all the fault of the poor, or even, the not so poor, but the folks in the middle class who bought houses with the encouragement of the deceitful lies of the mortgage companies. But how much farther can this argument go? How much wealth need be concentrated so heavily in the blood-soaked hands of the richest people and corporations of this country before it becomes unarguably their wrong-doing which has lead to such a disastrous state for this nation. Right now, 400 people in this country, four-zero-zero, hold the same amount of wealth as 50% of the rest of the population. This trend has spiraled beyond control over the last decade, made worse with the recession. How exactly can it be that with so much wealth concentrated at so few points that the poor of this country are the ones leeching the very blood of the middle class? There certainly are those welfare scum who do nothing, and have done nothing, to earn the government paycheck that comes to their subsidized home each month, but I'm not inclined to think that these few are the root of our economic woes when so much wealth is concentrated in the upper echelons of the rich. The numbers just are not there to support the claims that the few poor who actually cheat the system can control so much of the wealth being stripped from the middle class. To suppose otherwise is ridiculous beyond measure, and math.