A Tip of The Cap to 2 Real Americans. http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/immigrant-couple-leaves-dollar847000-to-america/ar-BBk8Pil A married couple from Seattle, including a husband who had fled Nazi persecution, made it their last wish that Uncle Sam inherit their entire estate. In identical wills, immigrants Peter and Joan Petrasek, who had no known relatives, left all of their money and assets to "the government of the United States of America," ABC News reported on Thursday. Last month, a cashier check totaling $847,215.57 was made out to the Department of the Treasury. Joan died in 1998 at age 79 from breast cancer. Peter lived another 14 years, dying in 2012 at age 85. It took a lawyer a few years to fulfill the couple's request of donating their estate to the government. "[Peter Petrasek] wanted to make a statement about how much it meant to him to be an American citizen," said Peter Winn, an assistant U.S. attorney who handled the couple's donation. The government deposited the money into its general fund. Peter was born in the 1920s in what was then Czechoslovakia, and would have been 12 when the Nazis invaded. Details about his early life are scarce, but at some point during World War II he was placed into a youth camp run by the German air force, according to The Seattle Times. In the U.S. zone of occupied Germany in 1949, he met the criteria for refugee status, according to documents seen by the Times. Peter's sister died in the Allied bombing of Dresden, according to the New York Daily News. His father was sent to a concentration camp, and his mother was left behind in Prague. Little has been reported about Joan's origins, other than that she was from Ireland. She married Peter in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1951, and by the end of the decade they had bought a home in Seattle. Peter worked for Bethlehem Steel as a metallurgist, and Joan was an upholsterer.
This couple gave their wealth to the government. I sorta get where they're coming from, though their money won't cover much of the waste, fraud, abuse, red tape, etc., of the government for more than a fraction of a second. The $billionaires are a bit more sophisticated about such things. They're unwilling to see their wealth get spent from the govt. treasury in a few minutes or hours. http://givingpledge.org/ They're directing where their money goes as philanthropy instead of letting Pelosi, Reid, Obama and their kind spend it. Why do you think that is?
Uh, because Republican wars and tax giveaways to the rich make the economy inefficiently laden with debt to rich bankers? Not the answer you want. Okay. Because the economy is a shell game to move money around among business owners while the poor live desperately in their little hovels? Hmm, not the winner, eh. Why would the selfish rich hog their money...I just can't figure it out. Maybe it's for the same reason the selfish get rich in the first place? Nope, I see you still don't like the answer...I just can't figure out why this couple was unselfish. As Economics 101 teaches all college freshmen, there is no such thing as altruism, so the economic and legal systems need to be adversarial and we must live in eternal conflict...We certainly don't need to vote on what we all agree about...
They're not hogging their money. They're privately doing what government is supposed to do - help people in need.
For the most part they "donate" to their own "charities" which they control, or each other's, and get tax deductions each year on the same money as they "donate" it round and round in a Ponzi-circle. Their favorite "donee's" are 3rd world countries because there's no paper trail to prove they never really donated. Photo op showing a tribe of 20 receiving pc's they'll never use and a claim that 2 million pc's were donated is blindly accepted.
If that were their goal they'd simply pay their employees a living wage. Poor people are CREATED by greedy people who hoard money. No man ever got rich off his own sweat alone.
It's not possible to hoard so much money there's not plenty for everyone else. Hell, the Fed just printed $trillions of new money.
Poor people are created by government statisticians, not by rich people. 99% of the world doesn't give a crap until riled up by lefties.
I kind of like the idea that you can give your already-taxed money to whomever you want without the government taking another cut.