BOO HOO!

There's an old saying, “There are three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies, and statistics.” With that in mind I just red the Yahoo News piece on how the gap between the rich and the poor is larger than ever. Well even though the article relies heavily on the that third type of lie let's assume that it is true. My question is; so what?

The reason for the difference between the rich and the poor income wise is habits. The rich have different habits when comes to money than the poor do. Dr. Stanley J. Thomas began studying the wealthy in 1979, and has written several books on how millionaires became and stay wealthy. The differences are both simple and profound. For instance:

• The wealthy don't actually use credit, they at least use cash, and are the ones extending credit. The poor take that credit and buy stuff they can't afford.
• The wealthy get up and go to work EVERYDAY. Or to paraphrase my uncle Lloyd, “They only work on days they eat.” And, they stay at that work until it is done or they are to exhausted to continue. Many of them will flat out state that's it's not a matter of how smart you work, or how lucky you are it's a matter of how hard and how much you work.
• The wealthy live within their means, their favorite brand of car is Ford, and they pay cash for them. The poor buy as much car as they can borrow for, and by the time they've paid it off it's worth the same $500 that the wealthy person's Ford is worth, but they paid retail plus plus plus.

And those are just the contrasts I can recall from having read The Millionaire Next Door several years ago. What is annoying to me is that our school system, and society, instead of teaching the kids to think like millionaires, is teaching them to despise the wealthy, and punish them. So instead of whining about the gap between the rich and the poor, why don't we study the rich, and start emulating them?

And, I do mean studying them formally. In the class room. Let's start teaching our children how to be wealthy. It's not like emulating someone's behavior is a radical idea. It's pretty much how everything is taught from basic math to sports. We show a kid how to do something, and then have the emulate us to do it themselves. So, let's teach them to emulate the rich, and watch them learn how to be rich.

After all they are the ones who have to care for us in our old age, and I'd rather be old and broke down in comfort, wouldn't you?

As to the gap they're talking about: Who knows what will happen to that gap? But, for darn sure emulating the rich won't result in more poor. And, isn't eradicating poverty a worthy goal?