Why Faith Is Bad For Ya

"You gotta have faith" as the George Michaels song goes.

To me, not so damn much.

Here's the reason: Faith is bad for ya.

Actually, faith is bad for everyone, if one stipulates several extremely obvious facts.

Fact 1: People are stupid. Half of the population is below average in IQ. If this isn't self-evident to you, then please stop reading right now and get sterilized, then shoot any kids you have in the head because you are too fucking stupid to be allowed to breed.

Fact 2: MOST people think they're above average. Since this is statistically impossible, there are a large number of seriously deluded people who are out there fucking with the rest of us.

Fact 3: Faith requires the rejection of rationality in order to maintain. If you think being irrational is a great way to live, please re-read Fact 1 and follow the advice there.

Fact 4: People are unwilling to admit when they're wrong to the point of violence.

For the purposes of clarification, faith is the unfounded and unquestioning belief in something. That something can be anything from your spouse's faithfulness to the deity du jour you happen to believe in today. You have no proof. You have no direct knowledge. You just have faith.

And very often, you're wrong about these things.

I'm not requiring or demanding perfection here. People are wrong about a lot of things. People make mistakes. That's okay. It's part of living and life. But it's when you're always wrong, yet not only insist you're right, you demand others join you in your mistake that gets my panties in a bunch.

"I'm not wrong about my faith!" you scream at the top of your lungs.

Yes, in fact, you are and here's why.

Historically, mankind has had many different religious faiths. Today, there are basically three: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Atheism isn't a faith because they don't believe in anything. It's not a disbelief of your idea of whatever your faith happens to be. It not believing in it in the first place. If you equate disbelief with belief, then you see the first example of Fact 3 about those who have faith. Those who have faith believe in "something". That is what faith is all about. Those who don't believe in that something, but a different something, have a different faith. Those who don't believe in any "somethings" have no faith. A lack of faith in somethings means no faith in a something. Since only those who have faith in a something can have faith, those who don't do not have a faith.

One might argue that not believing in something is a faith. One would be wrong. It takes faith to believe in something in the first place. A faithless person doesn't believe in what a person of faith believes in. A person who believes in something is the one saying there is the something to believe in in the first place. The difference between this form of psychosis and a nut on the street is the number of people sharing the same irrational delusion that the something in which they believe, for which they have no proof, no evidence, no way to legitimately and objectively substantiate their illusions, actually exists.

But is this why you're wrong about your faith? Yes, in part. This is because NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND HAS BEEN RIGHT.

Let's look at the whole of mankind's existence.

We started out with Unk, or Og, or Ub or some other such monosyllabic name for some imagined "god" who controlled something we didn't then understand. Little things like the weather, the earth, the sun, the stars and, well, pretty much everything else we encounter in our lives even today. We wondered where we came from. We wondered why we were here. So we mixed in a lot of guess work, a touch of philosophy and started a little thing called Religion. What religions asked for you was faith to take what these explanations for these things were (like gods and evils causing good andevil things to happen) at face value. To NOT QUESTION THEM.

Bad, bad move.

Then someone came along and came up with a "better" explanation. Of course, it was another god, or another rationalization with some philosophic overtone. Then some slightly brighter than normal people realized that other people sucked this stuff up like water to a thirsty person and decided to invest in it, reaping both secular power and wealth in the process.

You don't HONESTLY think the Catholic church is one of the wealthiest organizations on the face of the planet because they're saving souls, do you? Ever heard of their vow of poverty? If they believed it, the Pope would live no better than some street urchin in Cambodia. Please don't insult the rest of us who can think with your rationalizations justifying this.

Speaking of rationalizations, along comes another rationalization, and the faiths changed yet again. "Gosh, my faith didn't sound as good as this one does," people say to themselves and switch. More often, they switched thinking, "Hey, it doesn't matter who I give lip service to as long as I'm taken care of in the afterlife and I really don't want this driveling idiot fucktard to kill me for sticking with what I've believed all my life."

At the point of a sword, gun or by better rationalizations, faiths have been changed time and time and time again over the course of human history.

So why do you fucking think you've got it right THIS time?

"We've been believing this shit for thousands of years," you say.

Yeah, well, so did the Egyptians, the Norse, the Sumerians and the Greeks and Romans. Do you think we're worshiping the Sun God Apollo? Monotheism is just another rationalization foisted upon us by those seeking secular power and wealth over us.

It's all the same bullshit, served up with different garnishes.

So you are WRONG in your faith if you are one of the big three. In fact, you're probably wrong even if you're not one of the big three. If it relies on a rationalization instead of logic, it's certain to be wrong.

By the way, for the rationally challenged out there, this is an example of a little thing we who can think clearly and rationally call "logic". That's another thing you're functionally unequipped to deal with.

So, aside from a shared delusion, what's the harm? After all, Will Farrell is considered a good actor by a large number of people. A similar number of people thought "The Hangover" was high comedy.

Please see Fact 1 for the reason this happens. Please follow the advice for Fact 1 if you happen to be among those who don't think otherwise.

To be honest, it's not the irrationality or stupidity that is the major problem with faith. It isn't even the fact that people can't think rationally. Those factors are merely the predisposition held by those individuals who are afflicted by the phenomenon of faith. While I personally feel that the stupid shouldn't breed as a major favor to the future of humanity (mostly because they'll always remain susceptible to manipulation by those smarter than they are), it's not their lack of brain power that is the problem. Faith is the problem.

So why is faith the problem?

Faith is a problem because people believe in it and talk about it.

Really, that's the bottom line in this. It doesn't much matter if ONE person is irrational. It matters greatly when more than one person shares the same delusion. This is because they do NOT share the SAME ONE.

This concept is a touch difficult to follow, but bear with me for a while.

First of all, people are individuals. They have individual thoughts. They see the world from different perspectives. They sense the world in slightly different ways. Some hear better, some see better, things like that. And we all have things in our lives that impact the way we think from hormones to what we ate (or didn't eat). So although we may think we believe and have faith in the same things, we do not see them, experience them, or even think about them in the same way.

This is born out by the number of religions we have today. Look at the Protestant religion. A thousand faiths and growing almost hourly. People who can't agree with the dogma make up their own. (This also plays into the fact that your faith is wrong. What part of it don't you like? Why haven't you changed it? Others have.) They don't think about it the same way. They don't experience it the same way. It's different for everyone in some way.

Diminishing returns makes faith INHERENTLY an individualistic thing. Since you can't possibly know what someone else is thinking or EXACTLY how they experience it, you can only guess and chances are great your guess will be wrong. Faith is based entirely on guesswork and is founded by the notion that it's not okay to not know. Since when did "I don't know" become a "sin"? People aren't born with knowledge. They learn it as they go. Taking short-cuts by blindly accepting rationalizations only subverts the learning process and undermines knowledge.

So people don't see things the same way, and still think they're all following the same idea. Talk about demented.

Groups of people are dangerous in and of themselves. Why? See Fact 1.

More to the point, groups identify among themselves. Their ersatz commonalities based on these rationalizations give them a cohesion that would otherwise be absent. I mean, let's face it, if you didn't meet them in your church, or think they shared your faith, would you even bother knowing most of them? Would you even give two shits about them? You probably say, of course. Now, turn that around, WHY DON'T YOU GIVE THE SAME TWO SHITS ABOUT EVERY OTHER STRANGER? See what I mean about how a group dynamic is a bad thing? You're part of one group. That other stranger is part of another group who doesn't believe the same nonsense as you believe in. That creates an artificial difference between you and "everyone else". Your faith in that rationalization separating you from other strangers who don't believe the same myth as you is what turns you against them, and them against you.

(That inherent trust and group cohesion, by the way, is why con artists are most often church-goers fleecing the flock. You trust them because they share your faith. What a fucking moron you are to do that and you deserve to lose every penny you do (or did). Blame the group dynamic and your misplaced trust in your faith for it.)

So, toss in a bunch of rationalizations that inflict what others believe to be indignities on people who don't think the same way with that group dynamic, and you have a recipe for disaster.

We get repression of women, repression of men, repression of sex, repression of... Well, pretty much everything, if you were to follow every faith in the world. You wouldn't be able to eat meat, harm anyone (except, of course, non-believers), unless those anyones were committing some "sin" in which case you are allowed to stone them to death or beat them with a rod no thicker than your thumb. Oh, and don't forget it's not nice to own slaves who are countrymen, so be sure to own slaves from out of the country, but be sure they are properly documented or you could be jailed for abetting illegals.

I mean, seriously, people, what kind of twisted, fucked in the head thinking do you have to have to think you're RIGHT about ANYTHING involving blind faith? Others have exactly the same amount of faith in their twisted, fucked in the head rationalizations as YOU do. No single rationalization can possibly be correct. The alternatives are that all of them are correct or none of them are. Based on the fact none of them have been correct so far, it's pretty safe to conclude that none of them are.

Between a group dynamic that demonizes others who are not part of the group, the misconception of the faith by, literally, everyone IN that faith, and the fact that people are stupid (plus the other facts previously stipulated), we end up with a world that is fucked in the head and will likely stay that way until we abolish faith and start working on fact.

We're always going to have stupid people, until that average comes up, then we'll have smart people and really smart people. But because stupid people think they're above average, them not breeding isn't going to happen soon enough to save the species. So we need to get rid of faith. If it has to be explained in paranormal terms, using superstition and mythology, forget it. If you don't have a strong and overt element of doubt, and don't remain willing to entertain such doubts, you need to be "fixed" like Spot and Fluffy.

So all this begs the question: Do I have faith.

Not a blind one - which is what we're talking about here. I'm open to suggestion. I'm willing to say I may be wrong should someone be able to show me a more rational, reasonable, fact-based means of exploring that which we humans call the "spiritual". But I don't believe in afterlives - consciousness after death. I'm not entirely convinced we have a "soul", either. There's no evidence for it, but it's impossible to prove the non-existence of something. One has to prove it exists before proof exists one way or another.

Part of why I'm so against blind faith is this little fact: No proof of nonexistence. Someone asserts they believe in something - like a god - then says I have to prove it doesn't exist. Wrong order. They must prove it exists since they're the ones making the claim it does. Then they say they have to have faith that it exists, because if they don't have faith it exists, but KNOW it exists, then there would be no faith, so it wouldn't exist. The trouble is that the utter lack of rationality in this circular argument is lost on them. If it exists in the first place, why muck around with "faith"? To "accept it"? Hey, people don't accept the President of the United States and he certainly exists. So proof of existence isn't even remotely a hindrance to willful rejection.

And if some deity was actually all powerful and such, why would it allow all of the shit and strife we have in the world today over whether it even exists in the first place?

The places for gods to hide, where we can look at something, see what it's all about and understand it's not supernatural, it's not "god", but it's just the way the world is are growing smaller and smaller. We aren't here because gods created us and created this "perfect" world for us to fuck with. We're here because of a long line of improbable accidents. Then someone will say, "Well, God was behind those accidents." I say no, because last week, before we discovered we could prove we're here because of these accidents, you were saying we're here because God made us and our Perfect world for us and didn't say shit about these accidents.

If you know so fucking much, why didn't you mention that before?

It's a rationalization and you will NOT accept that you're wrong because of Fact 4: People are unwilling to admit when they're wrong to the point of violence.

But I digress...

Okay, back to faith.

Having faith and sharing it is a bad thing. Politicians and religious leaders rely on it to get their power on earth over you. Have no faith in people. Have no faith in rationalizations. Have faith in things that are real, or at least be open do doubt in those gray areas where the "we don't know's" lurk instead of trying to fill them with the deity that, before that place was understood, used to be lord of lords and king of kings and almighty in the universe. The domain of blind faith in a coming age of reason will not go away quietly or peacefully because people of blind faith are actively working - and fighting - against reason to avoid the inevitable time when all is understood and there's no reason to have faith in the first place.

The arrogance these people display that they're right and everyone else is wrong is what pisses me off.

I'm just one person, who believes in being reasonable and rational. We have enough problems in the world without inventing bullshit reasons to make things worse. If you can't handle the way life is arranged, that's YOUR issue. Don't expect me, or anyone else to buy into your lack of adult perspective. Grow the fuck up, get a back-bone and stop wishing upon a star for shit that you can never be as sure about as you think you are.

And for all that YOU hold holy, don't breed. The faster we get rid of the genes of people who can have blind faith, the more likely the human race will actually survive.

U.S. Founded as a Christian Nation? Yeah... Right...

The Right Wing (Or the Evil Empire, take your pick in my book) has asserted, often loudly and with great reverence, that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation!

Not hardly...

It's Final Jeopardy and the category is: US Myths and Fallacies

The answer is, "All of them." You have thirty seconds. Please put your answer in the form of a question.

(30 seconds later)

Right wing, contestant number one, you have thirty trillion dollars and own 85% of the wealth of the United States. What was your answer?

Uh, I said, "How many of the Founding Fathers were Christians?"

Oh, I'm sorry, Right Wing. That is an incorrect answer. The Correct answer is "Which of the Founding Fathers were businessmen?"

That's right, boys and girls and all the ships at sea, our Founding Fathers were Businessmen first, liberals (yes, really, liberals, interested in freedom, democracy and wary of large tyrannical powers that sought to limit personal freedom and choice) and, mostly not too fond of religions.

Now, it must be pointed out that they were against ORGANIZED RELIGIONS. This is an important distinction. They believed in faith, but they adamantly refused to allow a personal faith to interfere in the business of creating a government. They went so far as to put that into the FIRST AMENDMENT in the bill of rights.

You see, organized religions have this habit of screwing up governments. As observed by Thomas Jefferson (you know, the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence? Third President of the United States? Banged his own slave girl and fathered children with her? THAT Thomas Jefferson?) in a letter to German Baron von Humboldt in 1813:

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose."

Now, let's fast-forward to today. Our right-wingers have availed themselves of the lowest grade of ignorance to manipulate the poor, southerner/mid-westerner for their own purposes.

Now, least you think that perhaps he was talking about corrput politicians and priests and not about religions in general or Christianity in particular, he went on to say at another time:

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."

The score is Reason 2, Religions 0. And proof that not all of the founding fathers were interested in making a "christian nation."

But let us go further and examine the right-wing notion that they were trying to do just that: create a Christian Nation.

They were crafting a nation. They only needed a 2/3 majority to get the work done. And all of the 13 original states had to sign onto the newly drafted Constitution. If we were a nation of people wanting it to be a Christian nation, why didn't they put it in the Constitution? Why, instead, did they specifically and categorically deny the right of the government to dictate what religion a person had. Not only that, but why did they put that prohibition against the government into the very FIRST amendment which became our Bill of Rights? Going one step further to pound this home, why did they make that the FIRST PROVISION OF THAT AMENDMENT IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS? If these were all good and godly men foaming at the mount to create the first truly Christian Nation, why did they go so far out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot on the journey to that religious destiny?

Well, the easy answer is because they weren't that interested in God. In fact, they were so not interested in God, that the word God doesn't appear in the Constitution. Nowhere. Not a peep. In fact, "deity", "Creator" or any reference to anything even remotely of a religious, let alone "christian" nature is glaringly absent from the Constitution - aside from the prohibition on the part of government to create laws based on one.

You think, maybe, they were sending a message?

To refresh your memory:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Not only did our founding fathers tell the government you can't establish a religion, but it went on to say that you can't pass laws that tell others how to live based on a particular religion or faith since they may have a different faith and that law may interfere in the free exercise of it.

This isn't exactly what I would call "Christian Nation building" here.

The truth of the matter is that the founding fathers saw what the Church of England had done to the people in England (and elsewhere where other religions governed or had a strong hand in the running of a government). They knew that allowing any religion, regardless of who believed in it, or how many, to be able to take power in the government would be a disaster for the free, open society they envisioned.

So why were they so into a free and open society? Aside from a large dose of off-shore repression England engaged in before the Revolutionary war (and for a period of time thereafter, in fact), the founding fathers were BUSINESSMEN. Almost all of them were rich land-owners. Almost all of them were extremely well educated. Almost all of them owned businesses or were heavily invested in them.

In ANY society run by dogma, the clerics only need to decide something is subversive or immoral, then pass a law to outlaw it or restrict it. In a free and open society, people can smoke, drink and fool around howsoever they please. They can indulge in the vices the church often railed against: Smoking, drinking and fooling around. Many of the founding fathers owned (or were invested in) distilleries. Others owned tobacco plantations. Almost all of them owned slaves (something ELSE the churches hated and wanted abolished).

The founding fathers were creating a businessman's paradise, folks, NOT a nation of Christians. The LAST damned thing they wanted was some stupid church to get its meat hooks into the government to shut down their distilleries, make them stop harvesting tobacco (and hemp, by the way), or, heaven forbid, take away their slaves. Profits would plummet.

A cadre of "Christian Nation Builders" they were not.

So the next time you hear a right-winger talk about our found fathers as Christians interested in a Christian nation, you can do what I do: Laugh, point and call them ignoramuses who don't know anything about the nation they want to run into the ground.

Tell them I sent you...

Which Do You Hear, the Messenger, or the Message?

One of the things about human nature I've noticed is how often people will hear a messenger, but not the message. That is to say, what is being said seems less important to the listener than who is saying it or how it's said (or both).

When evaluating information coming to us, there are preconceptions people place on those providing the information. This prejudges the information, deeming what is being said to be valid or invalid simply because of who is speaking. Even the manner of delivery will have an impact on whether anyone bothers to listen to what's being said.

This proclivity becomes especially pronounced in politics. If the person saying things (regardless of the "things" being said) has a bad "presence", poor speaking voice, odd appearance or a history of saying/doing really odd things, the listeners will not hear what's being said. They'll focus on the oddities, the things that bother them, rather than on the words coming out of the speaker's mouth.

This is, of course, a two-edged sword. A "bad" politician will be unable to sway a crowd with presence/appearance/voice alone. But a "good" politician won't have to say anything memorable, relevant or factual provided s/he says it in a manner that is presentable, visually appealing and appeals to the aural needs of the crowd.

A few years ago in the late fall, during a commemoration of fallen war dead, a tall, awkward-looking, soft-voiced man stood up and spoke for a few minutes. He followed several speakers who orated with great passion and at length, to the delight of the crowd. There were several reporters covering the event. Barely anyone noticed what was being said by this tall, awkward-looking man and only one reporter out of dozens jotted down the speech for posterity. It was a remarkably short speech.

The presentation of the speech was poor. Barely anyone noticed when it was being delivered. Few paused in their writing from the previous speaker's orations and several never heard it at all. But it became one of the most moving speeches in human history - only AFTER it was published where no one had to listen to the speaker or be distracted by the now utterly lost and irrelevant but well spoken orations of the others at that event.

The speech started out, "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal..."

In this case, what was being said was FAR AND AWAY better than how it was said, or even who said it.

Sadly, in today's world, we are caught in a reality of sound bites. The three minutes it takes to recite the Gettysburg Address is too long for the attention span of news organizations who seem to think that quick, out-of-context or viciously short barbs and quips are actually relevant provided the right people say them. We are becoming less concerned about what people say, than how they say it or even who is saying it.

Politicians are great at rhetoric. All you need do to to get people cheering is to stand up on a stage, toss a bit of confetti in the air, drop some appropriately colored balloons and shout, "God Bless America!" in a well practiced, booming voice. But the "science" behind his goes a few steps further, and was touched upon in my "Rednecks" post.

Politicians never say insightful things today like Lincoln did 146 years ago. Today, politicians are strictly out to get elected. Lincoln was speaking to the future beyond the next election. In order to get elected, politicians now have talking points and each time, those points are changed slightly to accommodate the prejudices, sensibilities and expectations of the crowd. All of these talking points can be summed up with the phrase, "I believe in what you believe in, so vote for me."

It doesn't mean the politician is telling the truth.

At a Democratic rally, you'll hear politicians talking about protecting the environment, reducing military spending, increasing aid to the needy. At Republican rallies, you hear them talking about banning gay marriage and abortions, building a strong America with a strong military and bringing prayer back to schools. Both sides talk about fiscal responsibility (Yes, the liberals actually do that because to do otherwise would be to play to the stereotype). Both sides talk about doing the "will of the people" because "it's what Americans want!"

So you elect your liar of choice and what happens? Pretty much nothing. Neither side is willing to let the other side "win". One side's America isn't the other side's America. WHAT they said means nothing. It was all in the delivery. Next time you go to a political rally, LISTEN TO THE WORDS. The actual amount of meat (or meaning) in them wouldn't feed a hummingbird. Look at the crowd and judge for yourself if those words are just what they want to hear, or actually go beyond the moment (or at least beyond the coming election).

I don't expect politicians to be Mark Twain, Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln in what they say. Great oratory isn't written by the orators these days. Often times, great oratory isn't even written by anyone. It's all sound bites of quick, compact messages designed to influence you and convince you to vote for that guy (or gal). They don't move you so much as stick to you so that when you're in the voting booth, you vote for them in the hopes those sticky, icky bits of bites will FINALLY wash off.

And be forgotten.

With all the rhetoric out there in politics today, it's easy to get caught up in the stickiness of it all. But keep in mind, that stickiness is deliberate. They don't want you to remember what they said (god forbid they be held accountable for all of those promises!). They want to sell that feeling you had when you were cheering them (even if you weren't quite sure why you were doing that) long enough for you to go to the polls and vote for them.

At Gettysburg in 1863, when Lincoln finished his speech, there was a smattering of applause from the gathered dignitaries and reporters. That reception of his few minutes of speaking was almost silent compared to the cheers and applause which had punctuated the conclusions of the previous speaker's remarks. Lincoln thought what he had said was not liked or, worse, somehow insulting. The war between the states was a time of great passion, great emotion and great suffering. Our nation had been torn asunder by innate differences in how we viewed our fellow man and was poorly stitched back together by the imprecise, violent surgery of war without the benefit of anesthesia.

Over the years, that short speech, delivered so poorly by a man who would be assassinated fifteen months later because of the delusions of those who refused to accept the changes which had been wrought on the nation, has since resonated throughout American history. In the Boston Globe, on June 1st, 1865, a reporter wrote,

"Lincoln was mistaken that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Rather, the Bostonian remarked, "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech."

No one remembers what the other speakers said. It was a bunch of bombast, pomp and circumstances. To quote another man who was good with a phrase,

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Think about THAT the next time someone is speaking to you from a podium and inflames your passions about the things you think you believe in. Are those issues you're cheering about really that important? Or are you just so lost in the moment, you don't think about the future? Or, worse, do you even know why, or what, you're cheering?

The future is out there, and it's coming at us faster than you think. Next time you see a politician, LISTEN to what is being said. If you come away hungry, they're not saying enough. And if they're not saying enough now, there won't be enough from him when the future arrives.

Why Taxing the Rich Will Save the US Economy

I'm not in favor of tax and spend politics. I'm not in favor of increasing taxes just to spend it on social programs. But one can just revamp the taxes without increasing tax revenue and still get the economy going. The Government playing Robin Hood may not be such a bad idea, but it's not exactly giving money to the poor. It's more like making the rich pay their fair share while the the poor are pretty much left to their own devices.

(If you think being poor is simple, go to Spent and play a game or ten. Bet you starve.)

"Tax and spend" is a phrase used by conservatives to imply that the government increases taxes to create social programs to give extra money to the poor without any expectations. Often times, it means spending more than is taxed. And that is the context in which I'm against Tax and Spend. I want some value for my tax dollars being increased. But in this case, I don't want any increases unless they are specifically budgeted for deficit reduction. Rather, I'm looking at a shifting of the tax burden away from the poor and middle class and onto those who can most afford it: the wealthy. A shift of the tax burden will reduce the deficit (by stimulating the economy) without increasing tax revenue or adding to the deficit and without increasing or creating new "welfare" programs.

As I have mentioned, in the last 20 years or so (ever since 1990), we have seen the biggest a shift of revenue from the poor to the rich in global history. This gap between the Haves and the Have Nots was mentioned here earlier this month.

The idea has been floated that we should start taxing the rich more than we have and I agree - to a point. Tax the rich, yes, but no more than we actually need given necessary cost-cutting and fiscal responsibility. Then cut the taxes on the rest of us. We don't NEED to generate more tax revenue. We heed to shift the tax burden from the middle class and poor to the rich. Just doing that will stimulate the economy and make things better for EVERYONE.

Now, before we go much further, I have to explain how an economy works. You don't need to take notes and keep in mind, this is a thumb-nail version of the thing.

In the beginning there was barter. People would trade goods and services for goods or services. But there was an inherent inequity in barter in that some goods given seemed to be more valuable than what was received. So the concept of money was created. In essence, money placed a quantitative number to the value of things - be they goods or services. It worked so well, that money became what we use to trade for goods and services today.

But money has a problem. In ourt modern society, those who don't have money must acquire it in order to acquire the goods and services they need to live. They do this by trading their labor or talents in exchange for money. We call this work. A person who has the need of their labors (usually someone who is engaged in the manufacturing and sale of goods and/or services) hires people to trade their labors for his money.

All is well and good.

But some people have more money than they can spend in one spree. For a very long time, they kept this money (and other valuables) in their homes, but this became impractical. So banks were created. Banks operate as repositories of your money, who then use that money to sponsor other ventures with the expectation of being paid back with "interest", which creates an income for the bank so they can operate without paying themselves with the money of the depositors.

Again, all is well and good.

In an ideal economy, people labor for wages they spend on goods and services, the surplus of which they deposit in banks which use that money to loan to people or businesses who pay them back more than they were loaned in order to acquire goods needed in their lives, the excess of which is used to pay for the operation of the banks and offer a small incentive to the depositors for the privilege of using their money in the first place. As long as people are working, getting wages, spending wages and depositing excess wages in banks, things get better for everyone.

But then we have human nature to deal with and the major one here is greed. The greed is everywhere. The depositor who deposits their money wants the little extra the banks offer. The banks want more depositors because if they can make more loans, they make more money when people pay the loans back (Emphasis added for later effect). People getting loans want to get the loans, so can lie or fake the information necessary to get the loans if they're greedy, or find a banker who will give them a loan even if it can't be paid back because the bank looks at its income not so much as what is coming in NOW, but what WILL come in later. And the business owners are greedy realizing that if they can make their minions do more work for less wages, the business owner can make more money.

All of this has happened already. Hence why the world is screwed up. Going back to our model, the banks gave away loans to people who shouldn't have gotten them, meaning they have no income and no money to lend, and no money to give back to the depositors. (The FDIC isn't there for nothing, you know, but it, too, is running out of money). With no money coming in for businesses, they can't expand their operations or, occasionally pay their workers. So they lay the workers off. Fewer workers means less wages for the labors being traded, which means fewer people buying goods or services which means less business which means more workers are laid off.

But the bankers got paid. The business owners got paid. The poor don't. The middle class struggles.

From our (overly simplistic, but still relevant) economic model, we see where the money went: To business owners and bankers. In our society today, we call them "the wealthy".

Now, taxes were never mentioned in our economic model, but let's toss them in now and see how it all works out.

The government is in charge of maintaining the military, the roads, sewers, bridges and other public works we rely on to go about our daily lives. It also provides a safety net for those who for whatever reason can't exchange their labors for wages. It is financed by a tax on the wages of the people who live in that country. Now, a little about the people who live in the country. We'll split them up into three groups: The Wealthy (top 20% who hold the money), the Middle Class - the 60% of people who have been hired by the wealthy to labor to produce goods and services for the wealthy - and the 20% Poor (which are those who usually work, but at jobs which do not pay much, or those who can't work for whatever reason.)

The top 20% of the wealthy control 85% of the TOTAL WEALTH. If the total wealth of the economy was a million coins and the total population was 1000, the 200 wealthiest would have 850,000 to split between them, 600 would have 149,000 and the bottom 200 would have 1000.

The Wealthy have 4250 coins each.
The Middle Class have 248 coins each.
The Poor have 50 coins each.

Okay, let's move back to our model and see how this works. In a good economy, people trade labor for wages because the business owners has a demand for their goods/services. The greater the demand, the more laborers are needed. If the demand falls, so, too, does the need for laborers, which in turn means fewer people getting wages which means less spending for goods/services. The flow of money through demand is what keeps the economy working. If the money stops flowing, usually through a lack of demand (cause in this case by low wages), the economy falters and fails.

There are only 200 rich. They have a lot of money, but how many goods or services can they buy? 200. Their spending power is gigantic, but the demand they generate is small. The Middle Class and Poor are gigantic in potential demand, but compared to the rich, on an individual basis, their spending power is poor. If they don't have the money, they can't spend it on the goods and services their demand may potentially be.

Back to taxes. The Wealthy pay a lot of taxes, but they also control most of the wealth of the nation. In our model, even if they pay the 33% they pay today, the amount they have left over is still an order or two of magnitude greater than it is for the Middle Class, who control nearly a magnitude of order more than the poor. And that money IS NOT FLOWING as it should in a healthy, working economy. Rather than using their wealth to reinvest into the economy by creating new jobs, investing in new industries and making new opportunities, they're holding on to it.

Greed.

The Middle Class and Poor are spending almost all of their money on the necessities of living. They can't get enough well paying jobs to be able to pump more into the economy.

So the shifting of wealth from the wealthy to the less wealthy is in order. Since the wealthy aren't doing that on their own, the government has to do it.

Now, I understand the wealthy pay a lot in taxes, but historically, they pay barely a third of what they used to have to pay. They control 85% of the wealth. They should be paying 85% of the taxes. They aren't.

Let's look at what the taxes does to the coins people have:
33% of 4250 = 1403 leaving 2847
15% of 248 = 37 leaving 211
10% of 50 =5 leaving 45.

Clearly, the rich remain substantially wealthier than the middle class. That 33% in taxes represents 35% of the total taxes collected today. The 15% in taxes represents 60% of the taxes collected. The 10% the Poor pays represents 5% of the taxes collected.

The rich still have 10 times the wealth of the middle class.

But let's remember what the middle class does: Spend. A little goes a long way. 60% of the taxes means there are a hell of a lot of middle class. A small increase in what each of them has translates to a gigantic spending potential. By shifting the tax burden 10% so the rich pay 45% of the taxes, the middle class 55% and the poor 0%, then 10% of the TOTAL INCOME TAX REVENUE is shifted to a large number of people who are willing to spend it, all this without in any way, shape or form decreasing the quality of life among the wealthy. Given that the wealthy control 85% of the wealth, this shift isn't what one would call onerous.

In 2009, the US collected 2.4 TRILLION dollars in tax revenue. 10% of that is 240 BILLION dollars. Imagine that 240 billion dollars, every year, being pumped into the economy in the form of spending or even savings (which helps generate revenue banks can use to make loans which stimulates business, investment and hiring) without adding to the deficit. The "Economic Incentive Plan" we got from the government was a one time tax bonus intended to have people go out and spend it to stimulate the economy. It didn't help much because the public perception was it's one-time only, the economy sucks, let's NOT spend it.

A major tax cut for the 80% of Americans who actually do the largest amount of spending would be seen as a positive step toward helping them. Doing that without actually increasing the deficit, nor adversely impacting those who will be shouldering a fairer share of the tax burden will be even better.

As has been mentioned, the gap between the rich and the poor and Middle Class has never been larger. A shift of wealth is in order. It will take the money from where it's been (stagnating while only enriching the rich) to stimulating the economy.

The infusion of cash into the middle class would most definitely create more spending power and more willingness to spend it. This would fuel demand for goods and services, which in turn fuels demand for workers, which in turn puts more money into the economy.

This is a redistribution of the tax burden. Taking it one step further, increasing the taxes on the rich to actually generate extra tax revenue could ALSO be done. This extra revenue could be used to reduce the national deficit as well as help fund emergency social programs like FEMA or even bolster Social Security. But what would be best is using the money to stimulate business by investing it in the things government is supposed to take care of: Infrastructure. Just creating those jobs to repair/maintain/build the vital infrastructure the nation needs to keep moving would put more money into the economy and improve the quality of life for everyone. Putting more people to work generates more jobs which generates wages which can be taxed increasing the amount of taxes being taken in which can be used to reduce the deficit and further stimulate the economy.

But it all starts with shifting some of the wealth away from the few wealthy to the many of the rest who are willing to spend it. That can only be done through re-balancing the tax structure to place far more of the total burden onto those who can most afford it and away from those who can least afford it.

While some in Congress (who, by the way, are among the "wealthy"), call this idea "Class Warfare", the fact is the wealthy will benefit from a shift in the tax burden just as much as the rest of us over the long term. They're just too greedy to see it.