Until 2003 (I think) the trust controlling the companies Carl Zeiss (optics) and Schott (glass) still used a century old rule codified by Ernst Abbe: The difference between worker and executive income was limited to factor 10.
They got rid of the rule. Because something something managers are IMPORTANT rhubarb. I’m not aware that the companies are better off than before the change.
Right!?
#RIGHT!!??
I’m a middle aged white dude who pays a fair bit of scratch to the state and society does more for me than I put in. Why don’t people get economies of scale, deduplication of labor, and why the hell not: being a moral and ethical person?
Gah.
I think I need to go chop some wood or maybe do some embroidery.
There was a homeless woman in San Francisco I used to give money to every payday. I’ve moved back to Northern Virginia, and I miss her and wonder how she’s doing.
I’m not rich, but I am also not poor, plus I bet I’d taste nasty (unless I was cooked low and slow with a smokey dry rub). And when you are staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, divorce, health issues all at the same time, it really puts shit like this in perspective fast.
The only thing we have is each other, and neo-con libertarian rich people can suck it.
OMG that is my fantasy.
Yes, it was as satisfying as I had imagined.
I remember being shocked (honestly) that people earning a million dollars a year (or whatever) would still only put 20% down on a house. A HUGE GODDAMN house, mind you, but with a (now) huge mortgage payment and all that comes with that.
And my little trying-to-be-middle-class raised-with-blue-collar-values self couldn’t believe they’d want to take on that sort of debt. Blows my mind.
So here’s my thought:
Giving money to “Takers” just enables them to not be rich.
The rich are in a strange position. Like, on the one hand, if they only associate with other rich people, it’s probably profoundly dull and irritating if they’re not far-right wing. While this does normalise their wealth, they seem to then start competing upwards and live in a false perception of their own economic position and how the world works. They end up overspending, unhappy, and also would tend to seek to perpetuate this false view, because living in fantasy bothers people unless they can convince themselves that it’s true.
On the other hand, if they hang out with a more economically mixed group of people and live within their means or like normal people, the awkwardness and social weirdness that they cite is probably something they’ve actually experienced. Knowing how and when to tell people is a skill that they’d likely learn through trial and error, where errors can be profoundly isolating. Indeed, when word gets out that many rich people are trying to navigate the social minefield created by inequality, they become objects of mockery - which further drives them into their own enclaves. The enclaved rich are like cornered wild animals. Their danger is compounded by their intense resources.
What are we to do? While anger towards the 1% and higher is certainly understandable, I prefer a compassionate approach. The source of their pain and isolation is economic and social inequality. We should all come together to provide salve for this, to lessen and remove the injury that causes them such suffering. By taxing the rich until there are no more rich, providing everyone with a basic income, we can ease their pain. When everyone has enough, and, indeed, access to leisure, they will know that others aren’t pretending to befriend them to access wealth. No longer will they have to fear others finding out. Their high taxes will instead confer social status: here is someone who is massively contributing to the common good!
We can all come together to save the right their pain through a better tax system!
(In non-snarky news, telling people you’ve got money is nothing like coming out as LGBT. FFS.)
Hey, if burning with rage against someone who has $100X is emotionally satisfying to someone who has $1X, I won’t criticize.
Just as long as we bear in mind that on a global scale most of us posting to this thread are likely to be burn-ees rather than burn-ers.
Sarcastic response: Yes, and people struggling with various historically continuous and entrenched institutional abuses in American ghettoes should realize that someone somewhere always has it worse. Oh right, not so far away, Native Americans on the rez have it worse! So suck it up, ghetto dwellers. Get happy.
Non-sarcastic: Why should we bear that in mind?
Step 1: Octuple consumption taxes on all luxury goods and tie all executive compensation to workers’ wages.
Step 2: We all sit around a fire and holds hands and sing Kum-Ba-Yah.
Or whatever, I don’t care, just get step 1 done.
The irony is, perhaps, that your advice (assuming a far more progressive tax system than we have in the US now) would actually solve some of their problems, because if there was something like income equality, they wouldn’t be struggling to “keep up” with those further up the curve.
That’s always my instinctual response, too. But for these complaining rich people, conspicuous consumption is at least a big part of the difference (if not the difference) between being them (they probably think of themselves as “middle class”) and being “poor.” They’ve got a social status to maintain (measured against the super-wealthy), and they do that via their house, cars, clothing, etc. The elite private school education for the kids is to make sure that they make the social connections necessary to guarantee a life of at least as much wealth as their parents.
I don’t ask ghetto dwellers to suck it up. But personally, -I- try to.
Income taxes in America are more progressive than in other rich countries–according to an
authoritative official study which, to my knowledge, has not been contradicted. The OECD’s report “Growing Unequal”, on poverty and inequality in industrial countries, includes a table that provides two measures of income tax progressivity in 2005…
Here they are in an excel file.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/422013187855
According to one measure, America’s income taxes were the most progressive of the 24 countries in the sample, except for Ireland. According to the other, they were the most progressive full stop. (A more recent OECD report, “Divided We Stand”, uses different data, a smaller sample of countries and a different measure of progressivity: the results are similar.)
Before you ask, this ranking takes account of employee-side payroll tax as well as the federal income tax.
Why, according to the OECD, is the US system so progressive? Not because the rich face unusually high average tax rates, but because middle-income US households face unusually low tax rates.
It doesn’t have to be rage. If you believe in trickle down economics then you will still be looking to the rich for an answer to poverty. Besides I would still consider most of the 1% to be working class, they don’t anything like the power that the super rich have and if they stopped working and just lived on their savings most of them would end up in serious financial trouble within a couple of years at most.
I spent 6 months undereating because I couldn’t afford to feed myself properly (2004,£50/week before bills,<500kCal a day). Does that mean that I was in the global 1%, severely below the poverty line, or both?
Local conditions are very relevant.
The problem with the report you linked seems to be that it only takes account of federal taxes, which are progressive. State and local taxes are much less so, leaving the overall US tax system much less progressive than it would appear on a federal level:
(this will vary from state to state, of course)
Unfortunately, becoming super-wealthy requires the destruction of one’s conscience.
I hear the rich actually taste better when eaten whole.
