| The level of animosity on Dave Budge's blog never ceases to amaze me. The latest offense to the eyes was Mr. Budge's response to Matt's post expressing frustration at some of the raw deals young folks are handed. Budge:
I've got a recommendation: stop whining and start bettering your lives. Compare yourselves to the off-the-boat immigrants that come here, live on bird feed for a few years, and end up owning the American dream. The obstacles that those people face make your worries look like neurotic tics and yet you dismiss your privileged station in life as someone else's responsibility. Weak. Pathetic.
What's really pathetic here is the fact that Mr. Budge's hallowed hard-workin' immigrants are even more likely to be affected by the economic inequities Matt describes and are thrust on working- and middle-class families. According to the US Census (pdf), Immigrants are much less likely than native Americans to have finished high school and they're much more likely to be living in poverty. Because, in large degree, level of education dictates income, and income acts as a barrier to secondary education, it's not hard to see why a disproportionate number of immigrants turn to welfare and government-subsidized programs.
Of course, if you look closer at the census data, you'll also see that European and Asian immigrants have education levels equal to Americans and typically make a helluva lot more than Americans. No doubt that's because immigration quotas ensure that many immigrants come to the country already educated and also already likely to have a skilled profession in, say, medicine or technology.
But Mr. Budge once knew somebody that worked really, really hard.
Of course the financial problems that Matt was talking about - high cost of health care and education, specifically - are institutional elements of our society that benefit the richest among us at the expense of hard-working regular folks. You can push dirt around 80 hours a week and still not be able to buy health insurance for your family or send your kid to college.
That's why health care costs drove 2.1 million Americans were driven to bankruptcy in 2001. Of course, they're just a bunch of lazy ingrates.
That's why you're "25 times more likely to run into a rich kid as a poor kid on America's elite campuses." Of course, poor people are stupid. Mr. Budge knows. He's actually had a drink with a poor person once.
That's why tax rates, with the payroll tax and loopholes aimed specifically at the wealthy, are twice as high for middle-class families than the ueber-rich. But then Johnny Hedge Fund Manager needs his seventh house.
Of course Matt and I and folks like us are fighting just to tip the scales so that they're in balance. Everything is rigged to favor those that already have everything. We just want to balance it out, tip it back in our direction for a change. Apparently that makes us socialists. Or worse, we believe in democracy. |
