2012 US General Election Discussions: Start to Finish

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Miss Scarlett

i know, right? What i'd love to see is those who believe that folks receiving government assistance are living the good life try to live for 6 months on that assistance...let them learn what it's like to buy food for a month on far less than the cost of one of their designer label suits, try to pay their bills and keep gas in their cars, and deal with the frustrations and roadblocks faced by Medicaid patients...would they change their tune? i hope so...

In the novel I'm writing, one of the main characters is scion of a rich and aristocratic family. Her grandfathers (her mother's fathers), horrified at the mess their immediate offspring made of their lives, have a stipulation that at the age of 18 their progeny are cut off *completely*. They must spend the next ten years making their own way in the world without any assistance from the family. No money, no using family contacts, nothing other than what they can do for themselves. Only after that decade can they dip into the family funds. I would like to see rich families in the real world do something like that.

One of the best things my sister and I ever did, and the thing I credit most with preventing us from being really obnoxious, privileged, upper-middle class kids loosed upon an unsuspecting world, was enlist in the US Army. While my sister did, eventually, we were both in as ordinary grunts and so we were no longer hobnobbing with the hoi polloi but with working class folks. It was an education for both of us and we are only one generation removed from grinding poverty and my parents had wealth we were not in the celestial ranks occupied by the likes of Romney. Imagine if the Romney boys, at 18, found themselves completely cut off from their parent's money. I think that if they had to work their way through college or join the military as enlisted, they would have a very different perspective.

To hear Mittens talk as if he had scrabbled his way up the economic ladder turns my stomach because it is so obviously untrue.

Oh and arrgh, I hope ye be enjoying Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Cheers
Aj