I'm impressed Mr. Peterson, and your grandfather would be very proud.
I went to the website for the Peterson Foundation and there's no way to contact them yet, though, so the release of this story may be a bit premature. I think many common sense middle of the road Americans would love to volunteer to help.
Peterson: I'm not sure if we remember how to give up something for the long-term general good
TURNING POINT
You Can’t Take it with You
Blackstone's Peterson made a mint, then chose to give it away to solve U.S. economic challenges.
From the magazine issue dated Apr 7, 2008
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The turning point in my life came before I was born. It was the day in 1912 when my Greek immigrant father came to America. He came as a teenager, without a penny or a word of English, and with only a third-grade education.
He took a job as a railroad dishwasher. He worked, ate and slept in a steaming caboose and saved everything he made. With his savings he opened a restaurant, and kept it open 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 25 years in my hometown of Kearney, Neb. His hard work and thrift gave me extraordinary opportunities. Had I been born in a different country, at a different time, I would never have had the chances that gave me such good fortune.
I have lived the American Dream—I went to college, worked in the corporate world, served in government and became an investment banker. And that led to a second turning point, on June 21, 2007, at 9:30 a.m. That was the day the Blackstone Group—a private-equity, asset-management and financial-advisory firm that I cofounded—went public. In an hour I became an instant billionaire.
What to do with so much money? I have much more than enough, and there seems little prospect that I can take it with me. So again I turn to my father's example. When he had built a modest net worth, he gave generously to his old home in Greece and to the less fortunate in his beloved new home. Tears would come to his eyes when he sang "God Bless America." He so loved America for its possibilities.
I believe today that those possibilities are shrinking, endangering the American Dream. Personal myopia, political cowardice, fiscal fantasy and journalistic neglect are all at work. So I have chosen to put much of my wealth ($1 billion over the next several years and much of my remaining estate) into a new foundation, one that I hope will explain the undeniable, unsustainable and yet politically untouchable long-term challenges we face. Headed by The Honorable David M. Walker, who served as the comptroller general of the United States from 1998 to 2008, the foundation will propose workable solutions and build up the public will to put them into effect. I cannot think of anything more important than trying in this way to preserve the possibilities of the American Dream for my children's and grandchildren's generations, and generations yet to come.
Let me summarize three such challenges. First, as 78 million baby boomers reach retirement age, the costs of Social Security and Medicare will skyrocket, leaving us with unfunded promises of more than $44 trillion in today's dollars—equal to about three times our entire gross domestic product. Income taxes would have to double to pay for it—an unthinkable burden.
Second, our current-account deficits are unprecedented, fed by record trade deficits. Such dependence on foreign capital is dangerous. America as a country, and Americans as a people, must be persuaded to save more.
Third, our health-care costs are metastasizing. We already spend more than twice as much per capita as other developed nations, with no appreciable differences in health outcomes or longevity. These ballooning costs threaten the very competitiveness of American industry.
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