Your Mountain

It always seems like you learn your lesson from the last time, and quit being a pack-rat. But I have found I am guilty again. 

Packing up things has been as much as anything just throwing stuff out. I go to do a certain area and wind up with a small box packed and a giant bag to go out with the garbage. 

Ever wonder what your Legacy will be? Perhaps quite unimpressive for most of us, but one thing can be said for sure in the age of the landfill: a lifetime leaves a giant mountain of trash behind. 

The Light's Too Bright!

Wealth

A video has "gone viral" that examines the distribution of wealth in the United States. "Viral" suggests you may have to search for it, but that should be easily done. Meantime I have provided a link below.

It's pretty astonishing, alright, if we accept the numbers. We don't know who is speaking and we arent told how to access the Harvard study. Just saying. Snopes dot com has nothing I could find. 

I don't doubt what is being shown is factual however.Make of it what you will.

I guess if you could quiz this gentleman you'd find the cure for the problem is to be higher taxation of the 1%. Problem is, what he is showing is not income, but wealth. That means the cure actually is confiscation; redistributing income would have an incomplete effect.

Myself, I do not begrudge people for what they have. Certainly confiscation of property to provide equality of wealth is out of the question IMO. Redistribution of income is Socialism. Redistribution of property is totally Commie. It has a certain appeal, though, I don't deny it. There are times when I wonder if I would have made a good Communist. Just because "it ain't me" doesnt mean it couldnt have been me or you. Just saying.

People with grotesque incomes do get my goat. Maybe most of us feel the same way, after all we do have redistribution of income. But for me, it is when it is somebody who just has a job like the rest of us. I won't include highly paid sports figures and such, seeing as how they negotiate it fairly. But overpaid CEOs in particular send me to the moon. They really just have a job like the rest of us but can make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Getting back to the video, I think one reason we are all shocked is the way Class is being presented today. In most cases, it seems, it benefits whomever for the public to think they are higher in social status than they are. Everybody seems to think they are middle class, I have been going on about this for a long time. One reason for my problem is that the first time I ever saw facts and figures on the matter, it showed the upper class/middle class/lower class distinctions as a pyramid. Where did I see that? Might have been in the old encyclopedias of my younger years. The upper class was at the tip top only and the lower class was monumentally the greatest number of people down in the fat part of the pyramid. This is wealth distribution pretty much as shown in the video. I wouldn't want to get into who is middle class and who isn't, but I will say that for the vast majority with this opinion a case can be made they are perhaps in the upper lower class.

Looking in to this, the confusion seems to come when classes are divided not into a pyramid but a cylinder. The various classes are all huge because it is an arbitrary distribution of numbers of people. The maker of this video does the same thing. When he shows midway how America is the lower class, the middle class, the rich, and the wealthy - his terms and divisions -  they are not even all equal numbers of people! The middle class is shown as the group with the greatest numbers. And why wouldnt he? We all think we are middle class. 

Fact is, it may be new that it is getting worse in this country, but [as he admits] it has always been this way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM