Hurrah for the Rich!

“Tax them more! Nobody needs that much money.”
“But they are already paying 70% of all taxes paid.”
“Oh, I know all that, but they still wind up with more than anybody needs. Certainly more than anybody I know gets, even before taxes.”
First of all, who should decide how much is enough?
Let me tell you why I am grateful there are rich people in my country---in my state--in my town.
The obvious reason, if you know even a little about how the economy works; you are really talking about the ones who hire people and pay them salaries or wages when you talk about CEO‘s salaries or owner’s profits. More on that later.
Second, even if they never hired anyone, the truly rich are still beneficial to my way of life.
Do you remember when computers were first introduced? They filled a whole room, cost millions and did almost nothing. They progressed to being desk-top models that cost thousands and did almost nothing. “The Rich” were delighted to have a new toy, and had the money to buy them and the special filtered and air conditioned room they needed.. If they hadn’t bought those early (desk top) models, no businessman in his right mind would have given them a second thought. After a few years, the price had come down enough for me to splurge and buy my first computer---one that could tolerate the normal air I breathed. It had a 20 meg hard drive, but I was in Heaven! I could go back and change the text as often as I wanted to before I printed it. No more retyping a page because I miss-spelled or omitted a word. Best of all, I could save it and come back the next day and add, change or subtract anything I had second thoughts about. (The printer, by the way was a dot-matrix, with a price tag of $800!) Today, we can buy computers that do much more, will save your work, will hold ----(How much is a gigabyte again?) a mountain of pages, and produce and print them with, comparatively speaking, the speed of light. And all this can be purchased , complete with the printer, for prices as low as $400. In fact, for less than 500 bucks today you can buy a computer that is infinitely superior to the computers that were used to get our astronauts to the moon in 1969,
When the telephone was first produced, it was said to be “just a rich man’s toy, of no commercial value”. And “horseless carriages” were a menace on the road, and besides, they frightened the horses. Rich men bought them anyway, indulging in them as the luxuries they were.
So I say “Three cheers for the rich, may their tribes increase.!” (if you work hard and have good ideas for new things rich men will buy, your tribe will be among them.)
And about “The Rich” who hire people. Turns out, most are small businessmen
who aren’t rich at all. That $250,000 a year they talk about, in most cases are the profits of a small business, and when the government taxes big chunks of it away from them, they are taking the money that otherwise could be used to expand the business, (requiring new hires) or buy new equipment, making the business more profitable and enabling you to get a raise and all those benefits you delight in. Moreover, the price of anything is based on the cost of producing it; tax increases are a cost, and must result in higher market prices or cuts in size or service. (Remember the candy bars with about an inch of the wrapper empty?)
Besides, the truly rich, the ones who buy the new ‘expensive toys’, aren’t the ones being hit by those taxes. They do not have ordinary incomes of salaries or wages; their money comes under capital gains. Their money is protected by all sorts of little ways not available and/or are unknown to ordinary wage earners and small business people.
Yep. I am grateful for rich people! As I said, they are all beneficial to my way of life---the ones who pay wages and produce goods and services, as well as the truly rich who buy the ‘toys‘ that later become our ‘must haves‘ .

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