Not really, no. The rich still keep a good chunk of change hidden away in savings accounts.
You mean savings accounts kept in banks, as deposits? The deposits that count towards a bank's reserve requirements, allowing them to loan out more money to the person who needs a loan to start a small business? The deposits wherein increasing supply reduces the price to borrow money, reducing the interest rates paid for that small business loan? Are you talking about those savings accounts?
In fact, the wealthy are more likely to invest in risky areas such as hedge funds and upstart businesses simply because they have more money. The wealthy piss away quite a large sum of money on failed businesses and bad investments every year.
You're talking about the high risk/high reward investments that, if they pan out, provide the major productivity gains, the major improvements in people's lives, and the greatest increases in wealth production. Companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft (and many, many more) have vastly improved our lives in many ways. Or else money tossed down the toilet in some 'great idea' that wasn't really as great as investors thought. It's a good thing that 1) it's the people who have excess to their needs who are doing this type of investment in case the investment doesn't pan out, and 2) that we have people making these kinds of investments so that the big breakthroughs happen.
Do you honestly believe with those sorts of risky investing behavior that they don't save large sums of money?
I sure hope so. Think about it. We
want capital investment to try to find new ways to solve problems and new ways to improve our lives, but that investment is
risky. It is
ideal for those who have excess to their means to be the ones funding those risky investments.
And, for that matter, what's the conservative obsession with the wealthy? Do you believe that non-wealthy Americans don't invest? Why should we extend the Bush tax cuts (something I actually agree with) but tell the working class to go **** themselves by refusing them extended unemployment benefits?
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding something. Conservatives aren't the ones obsessed with the rich. Many conservatives would be more than happy to treat the rich
exactly the same as anyone else. You want to implement a tax code with no loopholes that taxes everyone equally as a percentage of income (what could possibly be more equal than that), most conservatives would be all for it. You want to drop all class warfare rhetoric, where the amount of money someone has saved or the level of their income is treated completely irrelevant to the judging the quality of their character, you won't hear any complaints from conservatives. No, it is the liberals who have a hardon for the rich. Liberals claim to love the poor (in a condescending way) and hate the rich. Conservatives simply don't see how a person's bank statement is in any way indicative of that person's character.
The problem conservatives have with unemployment benefits is the same problem they have with many other entitlements; an aversion to people living off of society
if those people are able to support themselves. That's why conservatives don't generally mind unemployment benefits as a means to ease the shock of a job loss and to help ease the transition to a new job, but the longer those benefits are extended, the more uncomfortable conservatives get. We
know that people, on average, don't try as hard to find a new job when they have UI benefits. We also know that they don't work as hard if they feel that they can fall back on them. (I just had a discussion not 3 hours ago in my living room with someone who works part time about how she isn't going to do something her manager wants her to do, and how
she hopes, as a consequence, that they will lay her off so that she can collect her full unemployment benefits because she still has X thousand dollars to drawn upon.) It's always a balance between 1) providing a safety net for those who truly need it, and 2) allowing people to leech off of society and thereby reducing economic growth.
