Ignorance

Below is my written response to someone who said this "I sure hope the conservatives don't get into power again, all they care about is making the rich richer and the poor poorer!"

First off, the conservatives are mostly concerned with efficiency. Their policies allow the rich to 'continue' to get richer, with the wheels just oiled up. Conversely the labour/lib-dem's put sand into the wheels that make the rich richer and the poor poorer....

Somethings been overlooked by you Graham. That being the rich will continue to get richer and the poor will continue to get poorer regardless of who's running the country. And what it boils down to is how smart you are with your money. Think about this, if someone on a million pound salary won the lottery what would they do with the winnings? Quit their jobs? Of course not, they would invest it, either in money market accounts, or in stock markets (really any form of investing). On the other hand you have someone who works on a 30,000 pound salary and imagine they won the lottery, they are very likely to go spend a large portion of the winnings on 'normal goods' (goods that demand increases when income increases) for example, Aston Martin, A speed boat, new clothes, fancy watches etc etc. Now what's the difference here? Those 'normal' goods have a depreciating monetary value, where as the wealthier person who invested it has (in most cases) a appreciating value on their investment. Now look at it less holistically: winning the lottery is essentially getting your paycheck. The issue is the inequalities of them (however those are not bad things, you need differentiating classes in a country otherwise your just communist) limit the motivation to which normal people like you and I will invest. Look at it this way If 'Jon' earns a million pounds a year and puts 10% of that into a normal savings account that yields 5% a year he will gain 5,000 pounds in the first year then increasing so on and so forth. If 'Adam' earns 50,000 a year (imagine these scenarios in a world without taxes, obviously in reality investments will be adjusted for tax) and puts 10% of that into the same savings account that yields 5% a year, well he's only earning 250 pounds in that first year. So saying the conservatives are the cause of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is just ignorant. Numerous studies have been done on this same topic FYI
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I have little patience for people who just attack the conservative party like this. If you don't like them for events that happened nearly 15 years ago (the conservatives putting a 15% interest rate into effect) perhaps even some of those have mitigating circumstances. For example maybe this contractionary monetary policy was adapted to battle out of control inflation! People these days are so judgemental and subjective. If there was a way to turn collectivist cultures objective, you're damn sure I'd pursue that.