The most popular series of Christian books is by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The series of 11 books and 3 movies starts out with all of the virtuous being Raptured up into heaven. The remaining books are about the struggles between those who have been Born Again (the Tribulation Forces) and the forces of the AntiChrist.
There is no doubt that many on the right are inspired by this series. They probably see themselves as Christian soldiers fighting the forces of Obama who they see as the Anti Christ.
They imagine epic battles between virtuous red state forces with the Tea Party in the lead, and the Blue state forces with the government forces and the unions, doing the bidding of the evil one.
In this apocalyptic, end of days fairy tale, who do they think are the ones that are raptured up into heaven?
We live in a world of the haves and the have-nots. The richest 20% of the people in the country control 85% of the money and the other 80% have to scrape by on the other 15%.
They say that the recession ended a couple of years ago, but to make that determination they averaged how the rich are doing, and how the rest of the poor peons and serfs are doing. It is sort of like if you had a dozen homeless, unemployed people in a room, and Bill Gates walks in. Suddenly if you averaged their incomes, every person in the room would be a millionaire.
The rich are not suffering like the rest of us. They live in their own world of luxury and opulence. They don't have to work, they hire other people to do the work and the thinking for them. They don't have to worry about the housing crisis, they take advantage of it. When the poor loose their homes because they lost their jobs and can't make the payments, or they walk away from their long time home because they owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth, the rich snap up the resulting bargains. More than 30% of the homes purchased today are paid for with cash. That makes it harder for the rest of us to buy a house because the banks have tightened up the credit.
http://newsgeni.us/?p=88441The rich don't have to worry about health care, they can afford the best care in the world. They don't even have to worry about the law. They can hire the best lawyers and get away with murder. Not one person was arrested and charged for causing the economic meltdown.
The rich don't have to worry about paying taxes. They can afford to hire tax accountants to find all of the loopholes. They can squirrel their money away in offshore accounts. As much as $100 billion a year is stolen from the IRS this way and the rest of us have to pay more taxes to make up for this lost revenue.
http://www.uspirg.org/home/reports/repor...Fifty years ago the rich had a top tax rate of 91% of their income, and corporate taxes made up 20% of revenue. Now even if they don't cheat, the rich are only paying 16.6% of their income as taxes, and 2/3rds of the corporations pay no taxes at all. The burden of taxes has shifted to the middle class.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/con...Money is power, and the rich and the corporations have changed the tax laws because they have all of the power. The rich own the media, the lawmakers and the judges. Now the decks are stacked so the rich can spend unlimited amounts of money to buy elections, or bribe politicians and they don't have to disclose anything. They were able to purchase an entire party which vowed never to raise taxes on the rich for any reason. They voted to make the Ryan Roadmap, the official budget plan of the Republican Party. This plan would lower taxes on the rich even more, which according to the non partisan Tax Policy Center, would shift the tax burden for the richest 1% from 25% down to 13.5%. The tax burden of bottom 80% of taxpayers would increase from 35% to 42%.
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412046_...The Christian church has been used for centuries to keep the poor in their place. The poor were told that their reward would be in heaven so they wouldn't try to overthrow their royal overlords.
Even though Jesus said that it was harder for a rich man to enter heaven than it was for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle, in today's looking glass world, up is down, black is white, and the rich are considered morally superior.
The rich are considered the virtuous, who will be raptured up into heaven, but perhaps because of Jesus's condemnation of the rich, they are not taking a chance on waiting for their rewards they are creating their own version of heaven, while the rest of us are left behind to suffer and fight over the spoils.