Why I cannot run for Office

One man, one vote - great idea and a true hallmark of democracy - yet also an achilles heel that politicians use to advance their own agenda and grab power.

In any economy, there are going to be poor people and rich people (yes, it existed even during the glorious days of the Russian Revolution and exists in Cuba today and in Venezuela and in all socialist paradises). The number of poor people (or ones that have far less money than the rich people) is usually greater than the number of rich people (often by a significant margin) - and thus it is easy to initiate and encourage class envy by politicians (who by the way are rich themselves and seek to make themselves richer by playing the class envy card).

Thus, no matter what happens in the economy - the politicians can always say "Look, the rich are getting richer" (and if the poor were getting richer, they do not have to say it) - and when someone says "Well, the poor are getting less poor" the politician will say "Well, the upper 1% got a tax cut of almost $500,000 while the lower 1% got a measly $500 - and that's a HUGE difference" (Ofcourse the politician will not say anything about percentages - that is even if the poor got a 5% cut and the rich got a 1% cut, the absolute numbers are such that the differences are HUGE and it makes the rich look bad - and ofcourse the politicians will not reveal how they have fared either and what portion of their income they have donated to charity either" (So, the aim is always to use class envy to gather votes).

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial recently The Poor get Richer
(May 23, 2007; Page A16) very interesting indeed

"It's been a rough week for John Edwards, and now comes more bad news for his "two Americas" campaign theme. A new study by the Congressional Budget Office says the poor have been getting less poor. On average, CBO found that low-wage households with children had incomes after inflation that were more than one-third higher in 2005 than in 1991.

The CBO results don't fit the prevailing media stereotype of the U.S. economy as a richer take all affair -- which may explain why you haven't read about them. Among all families with children, the poorest fifth had the fastest overall earnings growth over the 15 years measured. (See the nearby chart.) The poorest even had higher earnings growth than the richest 20%. The earnings of these poor households are about 80% higher today than in the early 1990s.

What happened? CBO says the main causes of this low-income earnings surge have been a combination of welfare reform, expansion of the earned income tax credit and wage gains from a tight labor market, especially in the late stages of the 1990s expansion. Though cash welfare fell as a share of overall income (which includes government benefits), earnings from work climbed sharply as the 1996 welfare reform pushed at least one family breadwinner into the job market.

Earnings growth tapered off as the economy slowed in the early part of this decade, but earnings for low-income families have still nearly doubled in the years since welfare reform became law. Some two million welfare mothers have left the dole for jobs since the mid-1990s. Far from being a disaster for the poor, as most on the left claimed when it was debated, welfare reform has proven to be a boon.

The report also rebuts the claim, fashionable in some precincts on CNN, that the middle class is losing ground. The median family with children saw an 18% rise in earnings from the early 1990s through 2005. That's $8,500 more purchasing power after inflation. The wealthiest fifth made a 55% gain in earnings, but the key point is that every class saw significant gains in income.

There's a lot of income mobility in America, so comparing poor families today with the poor families of 10 years ago can be misleading because they're not the same families. Every year hundreds of thousands of new immigrants and the young enter the workforce at "poor" income levels. But the CBO study found that, with the exception of chronically poor families who have no breadwinner, low-income job holders are climbing the income ladder.

When CBO examined surveys of the same poor families over a two year period, 2001-2003, it found that "the average income for those households increased by nearly 45%." That's especially impressive considering that those were two of the weakest years for economic growth across the 15 years of the larger study.

One argument was whether welfare reform would help or hurt households headed by women. Well, CBO finds that female-headed poor households saw their incomes double from 1991 to 2005, and the percentage of that income coming from a paycheck rose to more than a half from one-third. The percentage coming from traditional cash welfare fell to 7% from 42%. Poor households get more money from the earned income tax credit, but the advantage of that income-supplement program is that recipients have to work to get the benefit.

The poor took an earnings dip when the economy went into recession at the end of the Clinton era, but data from other government reports indicate that incomes are again starting to rise faster than inflation as labor markets tighten and the current economic expansion rolls forward.

It's probably asking way too much for this dose of economic reality to slow down the class envy lobby in Washington. But it's worth a try"

But none of this matters to politicians whose only goal is to say whatever, do whatever to get elected and given the realities of number of poor/rich folk, they can play the class envy card forever. See? I cannot run for office, I would have to be a zombie, idiot, hypocrite who cannot read to run for office - and I am not, as far as I can see, so far anyway. If I ever run for office, run this blog by me and knock me on my head and ask me "ARE YOU MAD??"