Income Inequality & Sulphur Springs

I think that Sulphur Springs is a pleasant little town.

We have rich folks. We have poor folks. We have a lot of people that live somewhere between those two extremes. On the news we hear (and especially ahead of the annual State of the Union speech) about the income inequality in America. 

If you haven't heard a lot about this, here's an article from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/23/pew-poll-obama-wealth-gap-sotu/4777385/

Of course, whenever you broach the subject of income, people on both sides of the debate have strong opinions. To simplify the issue for my tiny brain, it seems like the issue is:

     Should the government intervene by funneling more dollars to human services programs and/or    become more lenient on eligibility criteria for those programs, thereby increasing the number of households receiving federal/state subsidies?

     If the answer to that is yes, should the wealthy people in America be forced to pay more taxes to help fund these programs?

I'm confident that the issues are more diverse than that, but from what I've read and heard, that seems to be one of the core issues.  Should the government take more money from our richest citizens and redistribute it to our poorest citizens?

Coming from the director of a non-profit, human services agency, who literally gets paid to help people in need--I say 'No.'  I say 'No' to both parts of that question.

It is my opinion that when you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, you are doing two things:  1) You are forcing the people that have the most economic value to give their money to the government (which is well known for its trillion dollar budget deficit) so that they can fund the people that create the least economic value; and 2) You are enabling a culture of entitlement among the poor.

If the government MUST be involved, then instead of creating entitlement programs, why not fund grants (not loans) to small businesses?

I worked at a small metal art company in Clyde, Texas for a while. We were a business of 3 that manufactured and sold merchandise across the country.  That company was, and still is, at a point that because they lack capital, they cannot expand the business to increase their annual revenue.  If we had been given a grant (not a loan) from the government, do you know what the first thing we would have done was? 

Hire people.

As many of them as the grant allowed.

Immediately.

A small company in Clyde, Texas would have literally pulled people out of the unemployment line, food stamp line, etc. and restored their dignity and put them back to work. 

I currently run a small business.  We have so many customers that we don't really market our services that much because there's more work than we can currently handle. If our current grant was increased for the purpose of hiring more staff, do you know what I would do?

Hire people.

As many of them as the grant allows.

Immediately.

A small non profit company in Sulphur Springs, Texas would literally pull people out of the unemployment line, food stamp line, etc. and restore their dignity and put them back to work.

If the government is going to get involved in closing the income inequality gap, they need to shift their focus on taking money from the rich and handing it to the poor and focus on supporting the employers in America and letting private industry work.