How do we see money in the United States? In last week’s article, the BU Republicans stated that money does not correlate with success, and they are partially right. However, if someone does not have the money to feed their family or themselves, would that not be considered unsuccessful?
Being rich does not correlate with being successful, but living in poverty is often seen as failure or lack of success. In a nation where people have the ability to pour money into campaigns and elections, money has the loudest voice and the most power, which includes the top one percent.
Liberals and progressives do not direct their aggression to the one percent just because they’re rich, but because of their unethical means of maximizing their own profits. Not all of the people that make up the top one percent fall into this category, but when people are using loopholes to save millions of dollars that should go to the government, it becomes a national problem.
Even our president, Donald Trump has stated that not paying taxes made him smart. Is avoiding your civic duty considered “smart”? CNBC came out with an article in 2014 that listed twenty large companies in the US that often paid no taxes. “There are 20 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500, including drugmaker Merk (MRK), computer storage company Seagate (STX) and automaker General Moters (GM), which reported effective tax rates of 0% or lower in the second calendar quarter despite reporting a profit during the period…” writes CNBC.
When large corporations get out of paying taxes, it puts pressure on the rest of the country. In America, people are considered savvy businessmen and women when they get out of paying taxes, which is a culture that has to change and the left wants this to be recognized.
The Republican’s article also stated that donating money is charitable and that many people who are wealthy are MORE charitable. What about the people that donate their time since they don’t have the ability to donate money? You can record how much money you donate, but not how much of your time you donate. It also takes even more effort to volunteer than for rich people to give money when they have millions to spare.
I see that the BU Republicans did not include Ivanka Trump as one of their examples of people who worked hard to receive their riches. When people have the safety net of millions of dollars of inheritance from intergenerational wealth, it is much easier to go into entrepreneurship.
The left applauds those who truly had to start out with actual risks to create their own businesses, but when you’re born into a family of billionaires, exactly what risk is there for much of anything?
Opportunity is not equal in this country and people are not all born equally. Being born into poverty versus being born into a rich family will affect how hard you have to work to get where you want to be and the opportunities that come about in your life.
Lastly, in the current political system, money equals power. People who have millions to spare are able to deeply sway elections through campaign funding. Take Betsy DeVos for example: she poured thousands of millions of dollars into out-of-state elections, including Pennsylvania’s for Pat Toomey. So, the candidates that received money from her ended up voting her in for Secretary of Education, even though she obviously had little understanding of education and no qualifications to hold this position. DeVos’ money had more power in the Pennsylvania election than my one vote did, and she does not even live here. This is not a coincidence and sadly this is how our government works.
So no, money does not equal success, but it does correlate with importance and power. Some people are lucky to be born into wealth, but not everyone is. The left only wants people to recognize that people born into poverty have considerably less options and opportunities than the top one percent.
Chloe is a junior Anthropology and German major . She is the BU Democrats Communications Coordinator and German Club Vice President. She is a staff writer for The Voice.