The wealth of the rich comes from the poor.

It was an American novelist, F Scott Fitzgerald who proposed that the rich are very different from us. Not just different but we live in different worlds where we do not understand exactly how rich a billionaire really is and what kind of life he leads and the rich despise us as losers who want to want to rob him of his money in high taxes to prolong our miserable lives. Mitt Romney lost the presidential election in 2012 because he said that 47% of Americans were never going to vote for him because they do not take " any responsibility " for their own lives and " pay no income tax ". Ordinary people get just a glimpse of the lives of the super rich when they sign on to work as deckhands on their luxury yachts. Trouble is that the super rich are less than 1% of the population and politicians cannot win without the votes of the majority of ordinary people. One would think that in this battle of rich versus the poor the poor have the upper hand but not so. Politicians need lots of money to finance their campaigns and the rich are ready to oblige, provided laws are designed to protect the rich. There is no doubt that the rich are getting richer by controlling land and natural resources, which are finite, and through financial instruments, which are non-productive. There is a fierce debate about Prof Thomas Picketty's assertion that only redistribution of wealth, through high taxes on the rich, is the remedy. Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman writes that the reason that ordinary people are not more angry at the increasing inequality is because the rich are largely invisible. People concentrate on celebrities who are beautiful, whose earnings depend on being outrageous and who are not super rich anyway. They do not see the billionaires who live in secluded splendor, in luxury that is hard to imagine. The rich defend their right to their wealth because they see themselves as wealth creators, who pay for social support by the taxes they pay and who create employment by investing money in new industries. They see themselves as ' makers ' and the poor as ' takers '. However, the rich have to sell their products, whether smart phones or shares, and it is the ordinary people who are the buyers. If people become poorer and social support is restricted it will lead to fear and they will stop spending and save more. Since we in India do not have any social support from the government we tend to save 30% of our earnings while Americans save 5%. However, to really reduce poverty in the developing countries and inequality in the rich ones the numbers of people in poor countries must be reduced. There will be no need for the poor to compete for low wages to survive and workers in rich countries will be able to count on steady jobs.