Jug Hussein Ears Downgrade channeled his inner Gephardt the other day when he talked about “lottery winners” AKA “the rich” being “asked” AKA demanded to pay their “fair share” AKA more and more of their money to “invest” AKA waste money on poverty programs. Yannow the top 1% pay over 1/3 of the taxes in this country. I think it’s closer to 40% while making less than 20% of the income. As for this “life’s lottery” bullshit? Yeah. I really won life’s lottery didn’t I?
As I’ve written many times on this blog, this lottery winner and his sister grew up poor in a dysfunctional household with an alcoholic father and a mother who had to go to work to help support the family. My father wanted to go into business for himself and he and Mom refinanced the house so he could buy a service station, unfortunately, he bought a bar instead. He told my mother, “You can’t drink and make money with a bar.” He proved that statement.
Both my sister and I worked odd jobs growing up. She was the smart one who worked hard in school and won a four year scholarship to college. I flunked out of junior college. I joined the Navy to avoid the draft and learned electronics. I went to college for three years but dropped out. I did get a job with IBM.
I started with the Mattel Office Products Division and after 4.5 years, a friend pulled some strings and got me into the Field Engineering Division. I went from fixing typewriters to fixing large mainframes and the stuff connected to them. I worked 5.5 years on third shift to make more money and to get trained on more stuff. In a previous post I wrote about how that training got me hired as an instructor.
I was doing OK until I really hit the lottery jackpot and broke my back. Did I sit back and whine about how hard it was? Nope. I worked harder. I didn’t want anyone saying the only reason I had a job was because of Diversity (All Hail Diversity!). I worked with too many of those people and I didn’t want to be one of them. I outworked my peers and took every opportunity offered to me. I couldn’t work in hardware so I taught myself programming. I did a good enough job that I could teach programming. There were a lot of 60 hour weeks for this lottery winner and times when I was working two full time jobs delivering as many teach days as full time instructors while maintaining all of the operating systems I supported which was a full time job in itself. For part of that time, I worked for a manager who knew what I did and awarded me accordingly with good ratings and good raises. He even moved me into a higher paid job category which got me two pay raises in one year, one of 12% and another of 7% when they reevaluated the category.
During this time, I always paid myself first by saving and investing my money. IBM had a good employee stock purchase plan where one could take 10% of his pay and purchase IBM stock at 15% off the market price. This was a return on investment of 17.6%. Free money. When IBM started a 401-K plan, I participated in that to the maximum amount.
So I’m sorry Obungler, I am sick and tired of you calling SRFs like me lottery winners, people who have worked their asses off to get to where they are. I made it to 31.5 years at IBM by making sacrifices (5.5 years of third shift destroyed one of my personal relationships), working my ass off (many 60 hour weeks on salary so no overtime, coming in weekends), seizing opportunities, and making myself a valuable employee. I retired on my terms. I could have worked longer and after I left, I could have gone back to work as a contractor doing my old job. The CDSM© who hated me and was happy to see me go turned around and offered me my job back the year after I left and then again two years after I left. The contractor he hired to replace me couldn’t do my job. Nothing was handed to me unlike you who have been handed stuff all his life. If anyone is a lottery winner, it’s you. You are prolly the most unqualified man to ever hold the office of president. Sarah Palin was more qualified to be president than you. She had run a town and a state. All you had ever run was your mouth so I wish you would just STFU about lottery winners and how people “didn’t build that.”
Yannow who wrote sumpin about this topic better than I have? Thomas Sowell Here’s the start.
In a recent panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama gave another demonstration of his mastery of rhetoric — and disregard of reality.
One of the ways of fighting poverty, he proposed, was to “ask from society’s lottery winners” that they make a “modest investment” in government programs to help the poor.
Since free speech is guaranteed to everyone by the First Amendment to the Constitution, there is nothing to prevent anybody from asking anything from anybody else. But the federal government does not just “ask” for money. It takes the money it wants in taxes, usually before the people who have earned it see their paychecks.
Now read the rest.