Posted by
Steve on Monday, August 31, 2009 7:01:51 PM
This morning, I heard an interesting local story. A few years ago, a 9 year old girl with cancer, wrote to NBC’s Extreme Home Makeover asking them to renovate the Cancer Center in Tucson. The network was so impressed with the letter that they renovated the Cancer Center in Tucson and built the family a new home. This was a big event in the Phoenix area. It was all over the news and hundreds of people showed up for the unveiling of their new home. The home was 5300+ square feet with a number of bedrooms and almost the same number of bathrooms. The family received the home with no mortgage due on the home.
Today, I heard that the home has been up for sale for some time because the family cannot afford the payments. About a year after the family received the home, they took out a loan on it for $500,000. The money lasted until 2008. The Father was a truck driver and he reports that his health prevented him from working.
What this whole episode illustrates is that not everyone can handle prosperity. There are some people in society that will find some way to become renters, no matter what you give them. This is also illustrated by a report by the Arizona Lottery. They looked at all their big winners of the lotteries since they started in the 1980’s. An interesting trend developed. The lottery winners that continued working generally benefitted from the lottery winnings. Those that stopped working, almost always were worse off than before when they won the large amounts of money. Many were divorced and most were not just broke, they were flat broke and frequently in the hole.
The question is why did some succeed and others fail? The amount of money was not important in determining success or failure of the person or family. Comparing people with the same amount of winnings resulted in some using it to become wealthy, while others squandered it and became poorer than they were before. In the case with this family, they took out loans on the house starting about a year after moving in. The Father then stopped working as a truck driver and they lived off of the loans. In 2008, the loans became due and they are being forced to sell the home. They originally asked $1.8 million, then $1.5, now they are at $1.3 million. With a sale like that, the family is liable to come out of this with some money.
There was a principle about this I was taught a long time ago. If you take a group of people and put them on an island. You give each person the same amount of money to start. You come back after a time and you will discover that there will be a few rich and many poor. The same thing holds true for real life. No matter how you stack the deck, there will always be those who will be rich and those who will be poor. Taking from the rich to make the poor better off does not help the rich or the poor. The only thing that helps the poor be better off is to teach them how to earn more. Even then, some will try to get out of poverty and others will expect you to hand them everything. Neal Boortz calls these people the “Looters”. That is because they just take resources from others, they do not create any new resources.
Democrats believe that if you take from the rich and give to the poor, that you will achieve equality. Nothing could be further from the truth. All you do is discourage the top producers to produce and encourage the non-producers to not produce. That is the way to take the top country in the world and turn it into a third world power. Obama seems bent on doing it within one four year period. That would have to be some kind of record for turning a Super Power into a third world power. Most Super Powers of their day take at least a generation to decline and fall. A four year decline and fall would have to be a world record.