Of course not all rich people are alike, and not all poor people are alike. Nevertheless, if just taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor would eliminate poverty, it would have been eliminated by now. They have been doing that for 50 years in this country and, according to the prevailing liberal propaganda, the gap between rich and poor just keeps getting wider and wider. Okay, so let's just take more money from the rich and give it to the poor. If you keep doing that forever, there surely will come a point when everybody has the same amount of money. That may sound good on paper, but then how do you get anybody to do anything?
Funny you should mention Lincoln. He might have been born poor, but he became a lawyer before he became a president. He may not have had as much money as some other guys, but I don't think you could rightly say that he was poor. I used to have a quote by Lincoln, but it seems to have gotten lost when my old computer died. I thought I had made a hard copy, but I can't find it now. I'll have to put it on my things to look up on a rainy day list. The gist of it was the fact that some people are rich proves that others may become rich. The inequality of wealth is what inspires people to work harder to get some of it for themselves. The part I remember is: "Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, rather let him strive diligently to build one of his own, proving by example that his too will be safe from violence when built." Of course that's easier said than done, but so are a lot of other things.
You made a good point about tax money being everybody's money. If you raise taxes to help the poor, or for any other purpose, the liberals as well as the conservatives have to pay their fair share, so I will concede that liberals are just as generous with their own money as they are with other people's money. I still say that just giving money away will not solve anything, there needs to be some kind of plan that insures the money is being used effectively. You know, "Give a man a fish......."
When the constitution was written, the various Indian tribes were considered to be sovereign nations under the law, and Indians were not considered to be U.S. citizens. That was changed by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Any Indians who wanted to retain their sovereign nation status had to give up their land east of the Mississippi and relocate to Indian Territory, which later became the state of Oklahoma. Any Indians that elected to stay in the East lost their legal status as Indians and were supposed to eventually become U.S. citizens. That policy played out differently in some states, with most Indians being encouraged to head west at gunpoint. In Michigan, however, most of the Indians elected to stay put and nobody made them leave. Many of them got screwed out of their land by one crooked dealing or another, but they didn't leave the state, and their descendants are still here.
The Indian Reconstruction Act of 1934 provided a means for the re-establishment of tribes as sovereign nations, sort of. It wasn't automatic, there was a long bureaucratic process involved, and some tribes are still trying to get federal recognition. The members of federally recognized tribes hold a dual citizenship, they are U.S. citizens and also citizens of what the government calls "sovereign dependent internal nations". Calling them "sovereign" is a bit of a stretch, it would be more accurate to call them "autonomous", but that's the government for you. These reconstituted tribes, usually called "bands", elect their own government, and they also get to vote in the regular elections. The tribal government themselves determine the criteria for membership. If they say you're an Indian, then you're an Indian. The Sault Band has a copy of an Indian census that was taken in the late 1800s. If you can trace your ancestry to someone listed in that census, they will enroll you as a member of the tribe. There are some Indians who can't find any of their ancestors listed in the old census. Nobody denies that they are ethnic Indians, they just don't have the legal status of tribal members.
Why any of these Indians, tribal and otherwise, would deny their Indianship to the modern census takers while proudly proclaiming it to anybody else who will listen, is a mystery to me. I know you don't care about it, but I do. I will try not to bore you with it anymore unless I find credible proof that these guys make up substantially more than 4% of our local population. Then I will certainly say "I told you so!" because that's what Beaglesonians do.
Where is it written that you have to like gays to be a real American? It's not in the Bible or the Constitution, so I think it's just something that your ilk made up to aggravate my ilk.
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