Last night on Fox News’ “Huckabee” show, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee reported in his monologue that 129,000 millionaires had lost so much net worth during the past year that they are now not millionaires at all. And the super rich have lost net worth as well. Their wealth declined by 2.4%, the largest drop for any single group.
This he attributed to President Obama’s policies, since the president has made it clear that he doesn’t think it’s “fair” that some people have so much more than others.
At the end of the monologue I shouted, “I’ve said that!” And I would say it again before the one-hour show was over.
What he said that I’ve also said in two blogs in this space (“At Least It Will Be Fair” and “Time For The Zero-Sum Game To Dir“) was that when the rich get poorer, the middle class and poor get poorer too.
The governor said it very well, and I’ll outline it again, as I did briefly on Tom Garcia’s “The American Hour“.
It’s pretty simple really. If a person has a lot of money, they will do one of two things with it: they will save it or they will spend it. If they save it (greedy blackguards!), they will at minimum put it in a savings account, where the bank will then loan that money to middle class people like you and me so we can buy home, cars, and fill our credit cards with creature comforts.
However, most of their money, wealthy people will invest where they can get a better return than with a passbook savings account. In that case they are buying stock, which will enable the companies whose stock they buy to hire additional poor and middle-class people, improving their financial status, and to make capital improvements such as building facilities, buying equipment and expanding their markets, which enhances the finances of construction people, retail sales people, etc.
Governor Huckabee’s point was that when a rich person has to cut back because they have lost income and/or net worth, it is the middle and lower classes that suffer, through lost revenue from the rich, which brings us to the second of the two things a rich person can do with their money: If they don’t save/invest it, they SPEND it.
This makes those jealous of the evil, greedy rich maddest because it is the most visible. But, Huckabee said, if a rich person decides NOT to buy a third home, who gets hurt? Certainly not the rich person. They already have two houses. It’s the real estate agent who would have sold the home and the contractor who can’t sell the spec home he’s put his money into. It may be the carpenters and plumbers who don’t get work building the home in the first place, etc.
And if rich people are forced to eat out at fancy restaurants less often, that doesn’t hurt them, but it does hurt the waitresses, cooks and bus boys who may be laid off because the restaurant’s traffic is down.
And if the very rich can’t buy their third luxury car that petty, envious people drool over, that doesn’t hurt the rich people, but there are factory workers, truck drivers, car salesmen and many more who will lose income.
There was another “I’ve said that” in the show last night, but that will have to wait.
