My own income has always been unequal to my demand for more stuff. The more I have the more I spend. I do feel sorry for those who lose income and are forced to sell the Lear jet and maybe the Mercedes too, but not as much as I sorrow for those deciding to eat or buy medicine.
I finally learned, at the end of my life, that it is not how much money you have, it's how you use it. Would a family of four living on $42,000 a year be expected to have a pool, 2 four wheelers, 2 jet ski's, a camper, premium cable and unlimited text/data on smartphones for all members? To many of us the answer is "no", but I know many families that this is the case. They claim poverty. Todays society has their perspectives all screwed up.

Interesting. I don't recall Obama or liberals quoting Carl (or Groucho) Marx.
And it's simply because tens of millions of people suddenly decided at the same time to choose poverty over jobs with an equitable wage. And when they try to advance themselves (such as striking fast food joints), they are suddenly greedy, lazy, communists who don't want to work or better themselves.
How's this for communist brainwashing and Marxist doctrine:
The less gap of wage disparity, the more money circulating the economy. That means a broader tax base, which means more government revenue, which means less of a deficit and more debt paid down and more investment in infrastructure, education, health care--you know, the usual socialistic, communist, marxist, give-away programs.
Equitable wages also means more spending, more consumer demand, and consumer demand means more production and--yeah, you guessed it--more jobs.
But since this is obviously an communist plot from an anti-christ who hates America and wants to destroy all we hold holy, let's not do it.

:thumbup:

So far, every argument I have heard that wage disparity should ignored is the same regurgitated hostile name-calling when the minimum wage was $1.25.
The country is not segregated Texas in the 1950s. Those good ol' days are gone. Accept it. Communists and athiests and illegal immigrants did not elect the President. The country was changing before Obama came along. Republicans a la Tea Party either would not or could not see this. And apparently still can't. They insist that they speak for the American people and wonder why they continue to lose elections and why their polls are slipping below the president's. Time to get their heads out of the sand and face reality.

That's true, of course, but let me add to it: I think there just aren't enough jobs out there that pay enough to motivate people to want them. Critics of the poor like to say that they should better themselves to move up to better-paying jobs...as if enough of those jobs actually exist. They don't! The stock market is soaring because companies have learned to generate profits without unskilled American workers. It's a combination of technology replacing workers and the transferring of menial labor jobs to foreign countries.

Remember the days when unskilled assembly line workers could afford nice, tho modest, homes and cars? Heck, they could even afford to send their kids to college. Those days are gone.

Create jobs that pay a decent wage and watch the welfare rolls drop.

In a December 4 speech, President Obama declared income "inequality" to be "the defining challenge of our time."

It is time for me to come clean; to own up to a dark secret I have been hiding most of my life. It is embarrassing to admit it, but I suffer from income inequality.

Yes, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who make more money than I do and it has affected my life in ways too numerous to recount.

Starting with my first summer job as a bellhop and kitchen worker at a hotel in Maine when I was 14, I kept records of the amount of money I earned. The ledger records that on a really good day I made as much as $8 in tips. The hotel owner paid me a salary of $20 a week, but included a small room in the basement and all the food I could eat. He made more money than I did.

In the early '60s, as a copyboy at NBC News in Washington, my take-home pay was less than $100 a week. Everyone else, including, I suspect, the janitor, made more than I did.

When I finally got on the air as a broadcast journalist, my NBC check stubs were far less than the withholding on David Brinkley's paycheck. I still bear the scars from this income "inequality."

When I was 37 I made $25,000 a year and took public transportation to and from work. Many others, including most of the people I interviewed, made far more money than I did. Some of them had cars and drivers to squire them around Washington.

Was it "fair" that these people were richer than I was? Absolutely, as long as I had the opportunity through education, risk-taking, experience and hard work to eventually make more.

President Obama and some leaders in the Democratic Party appear to want us to accept a false premise: that if I earn more money than you, I "owe" you some of my money to make things "fair." This might be true if the amount of money available were fixed, but it is not.

The communist philosophy is similar to this way of thinking: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," is the slogan popularized by Karl Marx. In other words, mutually-shared poverty with just enough to barely sustain everyone, not an avenue out of poverty with hope as the mode of transportation, hard work as the fuel and success as the destination.

Income "inequality" is a part of the greed-envy-entitlement philosophy promoted by liberals who want to addict more people to government and entice them to vote for the party that is effectively buying their loyalty. And now they want to extend the 99-week limit for unemployment benefits, which has the potential to enable those people who are unwilling to look for a job.

Today, we have a tendency to punish the successful and subsidize the unsuccessful. It used to be the reverse, which motivated more people to become, if not a success, then at least self-sustaining.

There was a time when Americans would have been ashamed to take, much less ask for, anything from their fellow citizens. If you were able-bodied, asking for help from the government was regarded by a previous generation as moral weakness.

Today, the attitude promoted by the income "inequality" crowd is one of victimization. Poor people are told they are victims because successful people have stolen from them what is rightfully theirs.

Envy, greed and entitlement are not the things that built America, or sustained her through numerous wars and a Great Depression.

The concern should not be how much others make, but how much you can make if you apply yourself and adopt the values embraced by successful people.

Those who make what I once earned and think they can never earn more are being told a lie. Realizing this is the first step to improving one's income and one's life.

By Cal Thomas