I see. Your future pension is dependant upon the well being of your investments and you feel the great threat to your investments is government largesse to those who don't deserve it.
Not precisely, but given my marginal tax rate is 53% high taxes most definitely have an impact on my future security.
I suggest that the great threat to your investments isn't the poor, uneducated, lazy, non-taxpayers, but corruption and fraud of the corporations you invest
More like the great threat is investment fraud and screwing with the investment system, which happens a lot more than people like to acknowledge. But you spread your investment out, watch what's happening, react quickly, and hope for the best.
Me, on the other hand have no investments of any kind. I too worked as a busboy and labourer and gas-station attendant and a nobody in the Navy and on an oil rig and on merchant ships. Outside of the Navy, none of that work was permanent so there were periods of Pogey and sometimes welfare and sometimes sweet **** all. Finally as a low level seasonal flunky for the government. Invested nothing and saved nothing.
Why? You had the same opportunities as I did, didn't you? I was working as a busboy at sixteen, having dropped out of high school in grade 9.
Now I am retired on a government pension of 1200 bucks a month and am surprised that your government pension is so meaningless that it doesn't even factor into your pension plans. And yet, I donate money ! So much for your theory of generosity.
Oh I donate lots of money. I donate money to my brother with mental health issues by buying him furniture and a computer and paying for a condo for him to live in, and to my sister by paying off her debts and giving her the down payment for a car, and to several charities. And I pay a shitload of money to the government so it can help poor people.
However, unlike my friends, my future is not secure. Which is why she shrugs at things that anger me. She has no fear for the future with the high indexed pension she'll be getting, not to mention income from a triplex she owns and rents out.
But I squirrel money away, as much as I can, for the winter. And I resent the government continually upping my taxes by saying I'm not paying enough, in order to buy votes. You, meanwhile, are impoverished, but donate money. Is that generosity or just a continuing indication that money is not something you've ever been very good in budgeting or handling?
My concern is not the poor taking my money but the government encouraging poverty and discouraging investment, innovation, and self-improvement in order to win votes. I don't want to give bigger salaries to no-skill workers or give them bigger welfare cheques. I want them to be retrained so they can contribute to the tax base rather than being a drain on it.