ECONOMIC EQUALITY

 “Equality” Programs Aren’t Working

                    But Our USA Plan Will

Dick McDonald

Blacks have seen their annual income drop in President Obama’s first four years by almost $7,000 a year - all workers have experienced a drop of over $4,000 a year. Although President Obama recently claimed that the main goal of his second term is equality that same goal obviously didn’t work for him in his first term. But let’s be fair; not everything is Obama’s fault.

The facts are that over the last 44 years government has spent over $16 trillion on welfare, entitlements and means-tested programs in their “War on Poverty”. Predictably a greater percentage of Americans are in poverty today than when that “war” began. Predictably because government doesn’t create wealth it consumes and depletes it.  It only redistributes what wealth is left over after it takes its cut.

So when the “progressive” New York Times contends we need to rethink antipoverty policy we know their suggestions won’t work because their philosophy begins and ends with government as the vehicle where all wrongs are righted. And again government does not create wealth it consumes and depletes it through taxation and regulation.

However, NYT op-ed writer Nicholas Kristof recently pinpointed part of the problem when he opined that welfare and entitlement programs have only “addressed symptoms of poverty, not causes.” Unfortunately in his article he advances a .01% solution to a 100% problem. That was to spend more government money on the early development of children living in low-income zip codes.

That will be microscopically helpful in 15 to 20 years. It surely doesn’t address the problem now and that problem is poverty.  No one is saying that welfare and entitlements haven’t helped those living in poverty. What we do say at the Prosperity Commission is that we have to find a way to make the poor rich or comfortably so.  Until we do the problem of poverty and the ever-increasing $138 trillion of funded and unfunded national debt won’t go away.  It will progressively become more fatal to our way of life.

Most great wealth in America is created by investment. To prove that ask yourself where pensions invest their money. Investment in the stock market is where 98% of our pension assets are employed. Therefore the trick to making the poor wealthy is by their making an investment in the stock market and letting their investment accumulate, compound and grow over their working life into a sizeable nest egg.

That presents two problems. First where are they going to get the money to invest?  And second will they be willing to let that money remain invested for their entire working life in order to achieve the eventual goal of comfortable wealth for themselves, their families and their kids..  

Those questions are answered along with a myriad of others at www.theusaplan.com .  The ultimate result of the plan is that eventually the average American citizen will end up with a $4 million nest egg (today’s rate) and a $33,333 a-month retirement check.  Its enactment will immediately result in cutting the national debt from $138 trillion to $30 trillion and the creation of millions of jobs almost overnight.

The eradication of poverty is eons easier than to flying to the moon – and we already did that.