| HN Mirror

Wealthy people hold almost all of the power in America and the cultural reaction is to make sure other voices can be heard. I find that praiseworthy rather than something to disparage. I've known many wealthy people and many (not all) have been completely unable to comprehend the struggles poorer people deal with daily. Likewise, many of the poorer people I have known can't comprehend the lifestyle differences that come with being wealthy. My wife's mother, for instance, gives away all of her social security and alimony payments to struggling friends and family every month because her religion encourages it and she feels she is given too much in the first place. Her bank account is empty at the end of every month. My wife's nephew just graduated high school and also just had a baby with his girlfriend. He's working under the table and has no protections if his employer decides to stiff him, which has already happened multiple times on this job alone. He stays because he needs the money and is worried he wouldn't find another job soon enough if he left. He recently offered to get a payday loan to pay back her mother for some money she had loaned him for boots when she ended up being short on a utility bill. Fortunately he decided not to but no public high school in that area offers any kind of financial education course to tell him how bad of an idea those are.

My wife's brother drives all over the state looking for work, then once he finds a job he has to expect be laid off any day. On a recent job one of his team members stole something and didn't confess so the foreman fired the whole team. He pays child support for kids he doesn't see often and getting laid off can set him back months.

I have cousins who made dumb decisions when young and now have criminal records. A childhood friend reached out to me asking for money because his wife became addicted to heroin, ruined him financially and emotionally, and left him for another guy, taking his daughter with her. He had to spend a ton of money he didn't have on the court battle to get his daughter back from his heroin-addicted wife. Some of my best friends in high school were gifted but had great difficulty focusing on schoolwork and ended up coping with drug cocktails and are now working part time minimum wage jobs. I also know some dumb people who simply made bad choices and ended up putting themselves in holes they can't dig themselves out of. And they aren't even minorities, which are so statistically differentiated from white communities that when I build market models I have to remove ethnicity as an explanatory factor because it predicts nearly everything on its own and I don't want to reinforce stereotypes or abstracted discrimination among my customers.

On the other side, I know a wealthy international businessman who takes risks that would land anyone else in jail, like speeding around the city while driving drunk/high and crashing into a parked car. He broke his neck doing that but still drives drunk. For my wife's family that would have become a life crushing healthcare debt and at minimum a significant amount of time off work if not a life of disability, but for him it was a nuisance. He pays his workers under the table and his daughter just won a medal in the winter Olympics.

I work with several wealthy people who are working solely to make more money or have something to do. That's great but none of them have no understanding of the life of a poor person in this country, and they make assetions on how things should work based on how it impacts them and based on opinions they've heard from even wealthier people. I am related to people who have worked hard to become wealthy, and that is again great but now they claim anyone who is poor is lazy when that is not the case. They donate to causes that espouse the same.

I work in the real estate space so I also encounter a lot of lazy wealthy people who don't want to do any work but feel entitled to money because a piece of paper says they own a property. Legally and through market forces they usually are though they usually don't add any real value to society.

I've personally experienced both sides and my opinion is the poor need more help, whether that means education, healthcare, legal expenses, or just a voice in discussion. Successful people have their voice and are capable of amplifying it to the point where it reaches every voter in the US with little effort. The stories of millions of poor and working class are lost in the noise every day. It's not victimhood to describe your problems and explain why a certain ideology or policy will impact your life negatively. The wealthy in this country so often overlook real issues at lower levels that generally they will impact the lives of the poor whether they intend it or not. People are resilient, adaptable, and hard-working but sometimes they have a boot on their head keeping them dow and need help getting it off.

Also personally, I feel fortunate to have have lived and worked among many income classes in my life. I'm young, smart, hungry, skilled and effective so there is a high probability that I'll never have to worry about money again. I feel obliged to do what I can to change the balance of wealthy in this country to something that reduces suffering on a broad scale. I am working to get to the point where I can do that full time.