Many ( many!) unemployed in Europe are not even looking for a job. What for? The welfare payments are generous enough for them to be comfortable not working. As my husbands European doctor-friends say the one big difference between American and european patients is that American patients want to get healthy as soon as possible so they can go back to work, and European patients want to stay sick as long as possible, and get disability, so they don't need to go to work. ( who wants to work for the money they make anyway?).

Well, some people go to college to get married. Some to have fun and get drunk a lot
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and some to get an education...

What about private property rights? Is is not that those $100million is his private property?
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unless that money was made in a vacuum, it cannot be considered 100% private property.

and European patients want to stay sick as long as possible, and get disability, so they don't need to go to work.
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I know plenty of Americans like that too.

"looks a lot like Marksist ideology."
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- call it Marxist or whatever you like, but $10 million dollars is still a lot of money to live on. Plenty. By any measure. If there were assurances that all of this country's rich were just as generous with their money as many famous philanthropists, we wouldn't care what tax rates there are, would we?
What percentage of your income do you you donate to worthwhile causes?

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Happy New Year to all! Virtual hugs!

Why do they have to donate their money to "worthwhile causes"? What are those causes?
Why can't they invest it? Why can't they open a business and hire people? Is it not a worthwhile
cause? Why can't they use their own money to invent something and open another business and hire more people? Is it not just getting even more worthwhile?(ch) Wealth trickles down.
Man, how many times did we talk about it...

again, another major difference in our mentalities - I don't care how much someone makes - it's theirs!! - 90% of any amount is stealing, immoral, should never happen.. and why does the left always have to take an extreme example -if it's about abortions, it's rape.. if it's taxes, then let's talk about someone who make 100 mil.. you know well it's a tiny percentage of the population.. most people, who actually PAY taxes, don't make nearly as much..in fact, most taxes (73%) are paid by top 10% (making only over 100,000).. and this is not up to the likes of Lina to decide (who probably is not not even capable of making enough to take care of herself) that's 60K is good enough for some or not, when they spend years to get there..

Another important difference - Americans are the most charitable people in the world, also because they not are heavily taxed, while Europeans are not because their mentality tells them the government will take care of their neighbor and they don't need to bother.. "the bigger the government, the smaller the individual" - when they government takes away people's choices of being charitable with their money by overtaxing them, they make the people self-centered, not caring, not making decisions about own contributions and how they are spent.. that's why this election is the battle of our lifetime, we need to outline the differences between the American values (which I just described - power to the individual vs the government) vs the left wing values.. the government we have now are extremely left-wing, thank God the majority of Americans still not.. and we need to keep articulating the difference to them..

By the way, Europeans don't donate anything to philanthropy.
People donate usually out of sense of gratitude, or compassion.
In Europe, those senses are atrophied by the mentality of entitlement. People there expect government to do everything, so why bother to be generous.
There was a very good commentary about exactly this point in WSJ recently. I wish I saved it.

Ha-ha, Sveta, we posted our comments simultaneously, talking about the same points(ch) (v)