How much should you give up?
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| Tue, 10-21-2008 - 8:35pm |
My mother wrote an angry reply to a post on this board. It was deleted, from what I read in her email. I know you will ask how I got into her email, well, I have the password in case something happens to her. I went into it tonight because I was trying to figure out why someone as lovely and kind as my mother tried to take her own life today. In her email, I found a reply to her post. In that reply, she was asked how much this person should have to give to her out of her $250,000 a year. This isn't an attack, it's an answer from someone who knows and loves my mother more than anything in the world. No doubt this will be deleted as well, but here it is until then.
First off, none of what you will be "giving up" out of your $250,000+ dollars will come to her or to anyone like her. It will be going to pay off the deficit for your children, and hopefully for mine, so that they will not get to a point where they would rather die than lose everything they own at the age of 56.
You were talking about losing 12% of $250,000. That is more than my mother made every year. She lost her job, and is about to lose her house. She never had much, but what she had she has lost over the years due to having a chronic illness. She has no retirement, and has watched her home value plummet. If she sold her house tomorrow, she would make less than $30,000 on it. We all know that's not even a year's income, and she cannot collect SS for 6 more years.
So here's my answer to you. You should be willing to give anything necessary to save people like my mother. You should do it because you have it to give. You should do it because it's the right thing to do. You shouldn't begrudge anyone your 12% who has worked so hard, and given so much of her time and energy to others free of charge when they were in need.
My mother taught us to give. Every Christmas, we had to take one gift off of our "want" list (which wasn't very long, since we were poor), and give that money to charity, or to someone with less than we had. There weren't a lot of people who had less than we had, or so I thought. I learned from my mother that I was wrong. She took me to homes where single mothers who had been abandoned by their husbands sat shivering with their children, wrapped in blankets, because they could not afford heat. We gave her a used kerosene heater and a gift certificate for $30 for kerosene. It wasn't much, but she cried when she got it.
Our next stop was to an elderly black man who was blind from cataracts, and had lost his wife just a month before Christmas. My mother brought him a homemade mincemeat pie, because he had loved his wife's so much. She apologized to him, saying she knew it wasn't as good, but it was filled with love.
We gave shoes to children who had none, clothes to women in battered women's shelters so they could go to work, gas money to people struggling just to get to work, and food to families when the food stamps didn't last out the month.
My mother gleaned fields every year after harvest and donated the food to a soup kitchen, and she also drove over 100 miles around our county giving it to the poor and the elderly. She never asked for anything in return. She has literally given the clothes off her back, well out of her closet, to someone she thought needed them more.
Now she lays in a hospital room, fighting for her life, because when it came down to it, nobody would help her. We kids did as much as we could, but it wasn't enough, because we don't have much either. Social services turned their backs on her because she didn't have a job to go back to. She lost her car, and her utilities were going to be cut off. And nobody...NOBODY cared about this woman who has done so much for others during her lifetime.
You obviously don't understand the spirit of giving. That's sad, with Christmas coming up. Too bad you didn't have a mom like mine.

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"i better ignore for now, and hope that the CM deletes her racial slam to me."
Probably the wise thing to do :)
lol yeah i know what you mean
-Kristen
welcome to the board!
:-)
the hate is pretty bad....but on the bright side, it doesn't take long to figure out the people that can be ignored to make it a more pleasant place:-)
your comments have been quite helpful thus far, i hope you stick around.
-Kristen
"Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama and Biden will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Recipients of the credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of community service."
The key word in this is that "MOST" students would get this credit.
LOL, it was a really rough weekend.
Please forgive me if this reply goes to some innocent person. I just clicked the last person in the thread.
I've read this entire thread, and I just have a few more things to say.
First, my mom is still in the hospital, but is going to be o.k. physically at least. One more time, she DID NOT try to take her life due to some comment someone made. She isn't that weak. She is on the brink of losing everything she owns due to circumstances completely beyond her control. She had just reached the end of her rope. I do find it interesting that the person who attacked her still has HER comment up, and hasn't posted to this thread at all, unless she has two i.d.'s.
I am angry at seeing me and my mother categorized as liars, or her as a lazy person who will not work. I'm also shocked that people think that the middle class is trying to take their money. Obviously, they do not understand where taxes go.
And please explain to me how making investments and buying stocks helps the economy more than using that money to buy goods and services? If nobody is buying the goods and services, there is nothing to invest in. You can see what happens to the stock market when spending drops. So you think that your having enough money during the bad times to buy cheap stocks is making the economy better? I think all of you who think that OUGHT to go back to school...and study economics. It's the sale of goods and services that keeps the economy going. That's the major reason its crashing right now, not because some greedy bankers cheated a whole lot of stupid people by talking them into getting loans they couldn't afford.
This country has lost 2.3 million jobs in the last 6 years due to trade with China. That doesn't count the jobs lost to India, which is a considerable number. A study by Forrester Research says that 3.3 million service jobs will move offshore by 2015. The housing crisis has knocked another million or so out of work. And you greedy people are saying that these people don't deserve to be helped? Every time an industry collapses, such as the building industry, 25 more industries are hurt. The ripple effect is what kills economies.
We cannot afford to bleed jobs like this much longer. This is not as bad as it gets. The ripple effect on this is going to reach out to the upper classes soon..those who make $250,000 and over. If no one has a job, we aren't going to need whatever it is your provide. The good news for you is, you have enough savings to see you through for awhile. Good for you. For the rest of us, it's pretty bleak. Comparing not being able to contribute the maximum to your 401(k) to the suffering of someone who has absolutely nothing left but the clothes on their back just shows us how selfish and self-absorbed this country has become.
I'm going to bow out of this discussion now, because it's starting to make me really angry, and I'm beginning to see why my mother lashed out. If any of you would like proof that all that I say happened really did happen, I'll give you proof. Just email me.
Thank you to all the kind people who responded.
Maddie
Obviously you have mistaken my posts.
The thread just got that much more sad and depressing.
I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure
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