If we'd followed Bush's advice, Granny would be driving a Tesla

To The Daily Sun,

The stock market indexes are hitting one new high after another. They have risen about 5 percent since Trump was elected. In 2009, the day Obama took office the market was 8,000. Today it is 20,000, a stunning 250 percent increase in seven years. This happened not because of a strong economy, but gains driven by the ingenuity and aggressiveness of American business to prosper in other countries around the globe.

In the backdrop of the stock market explosion inequality has become the fire brand, the political talking point of the left. Like racism before it, wealth differences must be used as a cudgel to bang envy into the party faithful and create anger in the masses, with the sole intent to provoke a vote for the Democratic Party. Remember, the Democrats have been the self-proclaimed advocates of the less fortunate for 100 years. Every new spend-and-tax "contraption" Democrats dream up is cloaked in promises to reduce the number of poor.

Obamacare is just the latest in a long line of Democratic boondoggles promised to reduce the number poor only to flame out like an exploding star leaving more poor with new billions of debt for taxpayers that always leads to the bankruptcy of every program.

We need to ask ourselves an honest question. Why would Democrats ever want fewer poor people when their most basic election model relies totally on more poor people, not fewer — those voters rely exclusively on the benevolence of government for the opulence of their living standards. Every dollar of increased wealth in the hands of the bottom 50 percent increases their chances to escape government dependence. Once and for all breaking the cold, iron shackles the Democratic Party has on them to vote Democratic.

There is nothing that could be any more devastating to the Democratic Party's election hopes than to have the wealth of the bottom 50 percent suddenly rise substantially. It is no coincidence after more than a century of promises from a long line of prophets like Obama, the poor remain prolific, poverty endemic, and inequality is busting at the seams.

The less fortunate are never — I repeat, never — going to be better off without owning assets. It is how the rich add trillions to their wealth even under presidencies as failed as Obama's. George Bush and Republicans strongly advocated for private accounts for Social Security (SS) be tied to our equity markets. This forced, long-term, growing, financial assets into the hands of the poor and working class. Democrats responded by showing poor, granny going off a cliff in a rocking chair.

Let me point out what Democrats won't. Had we followed Bush's advice, poor Granny today would now be sitting in a new Tesla, not the Democrats' old rocking chair had her Social Security monies been indexed to the stock market. Granny would have experienced a spectacular gain similar in percentage to that of the top 1 percent. The bottom 50 percent would now be sitting with trillions of added wealth, money that it did not have to be taken from someone else. We would have made a small dent in inequality. Tens of Millions of people would be a little less poor.

That's why Democrats oppose everything that honestly aims to reduce inequality and not exacerbate it. Fewer poor harms their election prospects. That Democrats are advocates of the poor is like believing a fox guards the hen house to protect it from wolves.

Tony Boutin

Gilford