Wealth

the famine in the The Pope is coming to the United States and one of his concerns is the poor and how much the rich have. He is worried about greed making the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. He needs to do the math before he starts espousing solutions. Here are some simple facts which I have presented before but need to be reviewed at this time. Eighty people hold the same amount of wealth as the world’s 3.6 billion poorest people according to an analysis just released from Oxfam. Thirty-five of the 80 richest people in the world are U.S. citizens, with combined wealth of $941 billion in 2014. Remember now this is wealth not income, so it includes everything these people own and if we take it all away and give it to the 317 million other Americans we will each get 941 billion divided by 317 million and that equals $3,000 each. Does the Pope understand that the best way to help the poor is through an expanding economy that supplies good paying jobs and history has proven that the best way to do that is through the free market capitalist system. This system has pulled more people out of poverty than anything else. Without this system there would have been no industrial revolution and Malthus would have been right. Recall that Malthus was the guy who in 1800 said that the population would expand faster than the food supply and millions would starve. Another example is Henry Ford, the man who almost single handedly destroyed the ideas of Socialist Karl Marx. Marx said the free market would always cause the poor to be slaves to the rich but he never expected a case where the workers would make enough money to buy the products they made. Ford started paying wages that allowed this to happen. In 1915 Ford started paying $5 per day when a Model T cost $390 so a worker could purchase a car with 78 days pay. Today the average household makes $50,000 per year and a car costing $20,000 requires 100 days pay. The road to a more equitable distribution of income is a good paying job and that must be done in the private sector. You can’t make the poor wealthy by making the wealthy poor. As has always been the case there are too few wealthy and too many poor.