Someone has to pay, but why me?
By J. Jeff Toler for Shenandoah Christian Alliance j.toler@sca4christ.org
- “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today for sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” (Senator Joe Biden, 1975)
Biden’s generation is called by various names: Radio Babies, Traditionalists, or The Silent Generation. Born in the years between 1928 and 1945, Mr. Biden’s generation are described as quiet, hard-working, and lucky. Lucky? Yes, because, as Neil Howe writes in Forbes, “They were born just too late to be World War II heroes and just too early to be New Age firebrands. In their personal lives, this age location has been a source of tension. By the time the Silent were entering midlife, they spearheaded the divorce revolution and popularized (thanks, Gail Sheehy) the term “midlife crisis.” But in their economic lives, this age location has been very good to them—and given them a lifetime ride on the up-escalator coming off the American High.” [https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2014/08/13/the-silent-generation-the-lucky-few-part-3-of-7/?sh=7a7c9b992c63]
Mr. Biden may well be damned for any number of things, but paying for the sins of his generation is not one of them when he can, and certainly is, extracting payment from the hard-working, middle-class wage and salary earners—of all ages and ethnicity—who have not been given the same kind of opportunity and encouragement to ride the escalator to financial ease. On the other hand…
As of March 28, 2024, the “one-percenters”—those very rare birds who represent only one percent of the US population, own assets worth $44 trillion.
This is a breath-taking gain of $14 trillion just since 2020 alone. [https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/28/wealth-of-the-1percent-hits-a-record-44-trillion.html] According to writer Robert Frank, “The total net worth of the top 1%, defined by the Fed as those with wealth over $11 million, increased by $2 trillion in the fourth quarter. All of the gains came from their stock holdings. The value of corporate equities and mutual fund shares held by the top 1% surged to $19.7 trillion from $17.65 trillion the previous quarter.”
But here is another perspective: if somehow, they were compelled to pay off the entire national debt, which is currently at $34 trillion dollars, the 1% could, by liquidating their assets, pay off the entire sum and still have $10 trillion leftover to re-invest.
But there is yet another factor to the issue of who has the most control of the wealth. Among the US population it is the top 20% of the earners who control 50% of its wealth. Everyone remaining is in some form of financial glide-path, descending into poverty. California has boosted its minimum wage to $20 an hour, while many other states are less than half that. In Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa, and Kansas, the minimum wage is officially $7.25, which not so coincidentally, is the Federal minimum wage. [https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wages] Few employers are finding many job hunters who will work for that, unless of course, they are entering the country illegally—but that is a story we will explore later.
In her recently published book, “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women,” Batya Ungar-Sargon, (pictured) developed her thesis by visiting states across the nation to speak with the American working-class fighting to survive. These are the Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations. In their own words, they tell of the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them. Ungar-Sargon reports with incisive data and expert opinion on America’s emergent class divide: moving the basics of a secure and stable life out of reach for those lacking a college education—as if that will help anymore.
In her opening graph, she writes, “One of the things that’s hardest to comprehend about the richest country on earth is that there are a lot of poor people in it—And a not insignificant portion of them work very hard. A sizable number of Americans who work full-time are so financially unstable that their lives are characterized by insecurity; a constant teetering on the edge of crippling poverty.” Her book is available now on Amazon. [https://www.amazon.com/Second-Class-Betrayed-Americas-Working/dp/1641773618]
It should be obvious: corporate investors are looking for any way possible to bring in unskilled labor to fill the truly low wage jobs, while working with a political party looking for any way possible to produce voters from this same cohort—namely illegal aliens. This is the new slave trade. No one seems to consider, much less care about, the collateral damage that is being wrought upon the shrinking middle class, and all the more so to the nascent pool of young, native-born Americans hoping to pay for an education, or to learn a trade, get married, raise children, and invest in America themselves.
All that’s needed to complete the destruction, is the corporate news and entertainment industrial media complex to provide the distractions of race, gender, and whiteness. This brings us to the latest repugnant—and evidently enduring—political tactics, which is expropriation through racial reparations.
In his essay appearing in The American Mind, by Jeremy Carl, is an article adapted from his latest book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart” [https://www.amazon.com/Unprotected-Class-Anti-White-Destroying-America/dp/1684514584] that exposes how the reparations racket is still alive and kicking. Writing in The American Mind, he tells us, “While calls for reparations [sounded] absurd when Ta-Nehisi Coates proposed them in 2014, a decade later they are increasingly close to reality. It is not a coincidence that the initial push for reparations came not from former slave states (which have large black populations but are generally run by largely white GOP majorities) but from states and localities where whites have reduced political power or where those whites who are present are on the far Left.” [https://americanmind.org/salvo/expropriation-the-end-game-of-anti-whiteness/]
This should be enough to convince you to think that the scorching issues of race, sex, and all the other cultural hegemonies are, in the final analysis, linked to wealth: its accumulation, its appropriation, and it’s redistribution. If you’re still skeptical of someone who claims he will pay for the sins of his generation, don’t believe him, because he wants you and me to pay for them. This is a sin, and the wages for that are more than he can ever hope to pay on his own.
- You are loving and kind to thousands, yet children suffer for their fathers’ sins; you are the great and mighty God, the Lord Almighty. You have all wisdom and do great and mighty miracles; for your eyes are open to all the ways of men, and you reward everyone according to his life and deeds. (Jeremiah 32:18-19 Living Bible)
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