Dear Editor:
An article by Allison Jackson, Global Post published Nov. 7 headlines "85 richest now have as much money as poorest 3.5 B(illion)." ( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/11/07/globalpost-richest-poorest/18640031/ ) A quote from the article: "Oxfam now calculates that the 85 richest billionaires on the planet, including the likes of Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, have as much money as the 3.5 billion poorest people."
Quotes from the article: "Oxfam estimates that between March 2013 and March 2014, those same 85 billionaires saw their wealth grow by $668 million every day. These people are so grotesquely rich that if Bill Gates, for example, spent $1 million every day, it would take him 218 years to exhaust his funds. That of course, would never happen because Gates would be earning millions of dollars a day in interest on the rest of his wealth. When you have more money than you could possibly spend in several lifetimes, you can afford to do some pretty crazy things. Like spend $95,000 on a four lb. white truffle that looks like a turd because when your name is Vladimir Potanin, the Russian mining tycoon, and you have a net worth of $13.9 billion, $95,000 is pocket change."
For those not familiar with Oxfam logon to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfam .
A quote from former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary Peter Edelman's book: "The only way we will improve the lot of the poor, stabilize the middle class, and protect our democracy is by requiring the rich to pay more of the cost of governing the country that enables their huge accretion of wealth." Who other than a self-serving bureaucrat whose livelihood depends solely on tax revenue actually believes that giving any government more money ever solves anything? It's just a vicious cycle perpetuated by secular leftist bureaucrats capitalizing on our Christian doctrine of helping the poor to justify more and more taxes resulting in more bureaucrats.
The solution? Stop all payments to foreign governments and the UN and use the savings to increase tax deductions to legitimate non-profit charities that must account for all expenditures to guarantee an appropriate balance between overhead and distribution directly to the poor. That way the money from everyone including the super rich would go directly to the needy and not be laundered through any government bureaucracy.