Income

Since the dawn of civilized man there has been a gap between the rich and the poor. To equalize things has never worked because there were always too few rich and too many poor. Various leaders have used this discrepancy in wealth to gain political power but they have always failed to come through with their promises. The latest example is Chavez in Venezuela. He took a country that was struggling and single handedly brought it to its knees. When Bernie Sanders was running he promised to take from the one percent and give it to the 99% but mathematically that would not do much good. This came to my attention last year, when an article appeared in the local paper saying that the six members of the Walmart family had a worth of 90 billion dollars and this was more than the lowest 50 million families in the country. Understand this is not their income it is their wealth mostly in Walmart stock. So let’s redistribute this money and in doing so each family would get $1,900 which they could quickly spend on a new refrigerator. In 2013, 138.3 million taxpayers reported earning $9.03 trillion in adjusted gross income. The top 1 percent earned 20% of the income or 1.8 trillion. Of that 1.8 trillion 46% or 800 billion was paid in taxes leaving the one percenters with 1 trillion. Now if we take all of that and give it to the rest of us we will each get $3,300. A nice Christmas bonus but not life changing like a good job would be. There is one way that income redistribution will work and that is raising the wages paid to people who work at McDonalds and Walmart. Most of the people who work there are middle to lower income people and most of the people who shop there are middle to lower income people and each group is very large. I spend $1,000 per month at Walmart since we buy our food and other household products there. I did some calculations based on Walmart sales in the United States and compared that to the number of non-management employees and found that if they increase the cost of their goods by 6% they could double the wages. I told him that his would mean $60 per month more out of my pocket and I would be happy to pay that if the money went to wages. I doubt that my letter had any influence but shortly after that Walmart came out and gave everyone a one dollar per hour raise.