Originally Posted by
Robert Foster
I never said cars weren't expensive. I said that the percentage against someone making $15,000 a year is naturally going to be higher than one making 60k or 200k. That doesn't make it class warfare. One side didn't force the other into their spending habits. There is absolutely nothing T. Boon Pickens did that made it harder on Joe Plumber. It is simply the way things are in this country and others I might add.
For it to be class warfare there needs to be a planned aggression on the part of one class to the other. In the case of somewhere like India that has or had a cast system one class suppressed the other and kept them from advancing. Economics not the ruling class has made things hard on the working poor.
You can purchase a motorized scooter to decrease the cost of car ownership or even a motorcycle so there are ways to cut back. But if the person claiming class warfare willingly walks into debt trying to be like someone they aren’t then it is their fault the percentage is so high. It might even be blamed on Madison Avenue but it is hardly class warfare it is more of a case of not following “Buyer Beware”.
It is not a case of people can’t do better because I rode a motorcycle to commute to work for 8 years paying a fraction of the insurance and a fraction of the fuel costs of most of my fellow workers. They had the same choices I did and I am not more educated than most of them nor was I lucky.
I guess I simply don’t get the class warfare thing. There is more of a class warfare between full time utility cyclists and recreational cyclists.
I think it's pretty obvious that there
actually is class warfare, and to paraphrase Warren Buffet, his class is winning. We've spent a ton of public money creating an obscenely expensive transportation infrastructure that requires a large personal investment just to be able to use that infrastructure. Many, many people simply have to drive in order to get anywhere, as much as I hate to say it. Outside of core areas of large cities, there is simply no option to sucking it up and paying the myriad of expenses associated with owning and operating a car. The cruel irony is that, in those very same areas where a car-free existence is actually possible, the real estate is so expensive that, again, only the well-off have access to it, unless people are willing to live on top of one another like rats. Millions of our citizens are doomed to a life of incessant poverty, no matter how hard they work, just so the wealthy and what's left of the middle class can drive their SUVs at will.
Several weeks ago, Glenn Beck, alluding to the film "It's a Wonderful Life," compared the US under Obama to Potterville. I would argue that the policies of our more "conservative" elements of our leadership, those who favor cutting taxes for the wealthy while gutting any public expenditures that might improve the country at large, are the ones who are actively making that dreary nightmare vision a reality.