To the editor:
People probably heard that the rich don’t live in the same economy as the rest of us, but how does that really work? I’ll explain it, just eighth-grade level arithmetic required.
Let’s say you were worth a lot of money. Someone offers you two investments.
The first one is: you invest one billion dollars and in five years you get back two billion dollars that is worth two billion dollars.
The second is: you invest one billion dollars and in five years you make five billion dollars that is worth three billion dollars.
Every person who could afford to make these investments know exactly what I’m talking about, and they would probably take the latter investment. So how do you invest that much money and it comes back not being worth so much? The answer is these investments are made purchasing war machines, war machine accessories and the labor that supports our military during war.
When the government spends a billion dollars on helicopters and planes and bombs they write a check for it. The problem is they had to borrow the money to write the check. The Iraq war cost us $2 trillion, every penny on the credit card of the USA, (You can thank “W” for that one). By the time we pay the interest on these loans the war would cost us a lot more.
So what happens to our money when investments like this are made? The value of the dollar goes down, a little. We all know how that affects us when wages stay stagnant and prices for things we buy every week and bills we pay every month go up. But, how does it affect the rich? Not much. Their biggest concern for the rich is that the economy gets bad and there is nothing else for people to do … like a war, for example.
The examples I used were extreme, but this is how it works. The investors get today’s money at today’s value. We pay on the loans, interest and all for several generations. That is exactly what this tax bill was about. It will only make the rich richer and the poor poorer. A good example of this is that this bill eliminates a $250 deduction teachers have been able to take for purchasing classroom supplies out of their pockets, and that just stinks, just like this tax bill.
Mark Duwe
Columbus
