| IMAGES OF INEQUALITY |
The folks at Rolls-Royce will customize just about anything for you. This new Rolls came with a bespoke picnic basket, the Pursuitist notes, “complete with custom china, silver, and glassware based on the owners' request.” Other custom requests stand out a bit more. Rolls recently delivered a new $300,000 Wraith model painted to match the color of the new owner’s pale pink leather gloves. ( from Too Much, May 12, 2014, Sam Pizzigatti) |
What Inequality?
Shills for the .01% will invariably raise the straw man that it would be totally unfair if everyone--regardless of talent, training, and effort--earned the same as everyone else. Should a bum working as a clerk in an all-night bodega make as much as an emergency room physician? Should a sewer cleaner make as much as a Nobel prize winning physicist? Should a cop make as much as a judge?
Without getting into that argument (since I can think of many instances where risks and responsibilities challenge the conventional wisdom) I'll grant that for the most part there certainly must be grades of income and corresponding grades of wealth accumulation.
I, as well as many other progressives, have no problem with wealth that is a product of hard work, exceptional talent, and fair competition. But when that wealth is really a product of inheritance, rigged markets, and tax favoritism, I think such aggrandizement runs counter to the American Dream of individual accomplishment.
Taylor Swift, for example, earned $39.7 million last year, the highest income of US singers. Maybe you think TS hung the moon or maybe you think she isn't any good at all. But compare her earnings to the top hedge fund earner last year, David Tepper, who made $3.5 billion and we begin to see a disparity which is so vast that to describe it as unequal borders on misrepresentation. Tepper's day brings $9.6 million; Swift's, $109 thousand.
Swift's daily bucks certainly look good to minimum wage workers (who wish they could make that in a year) and, if my slight knowledge of the celebrity scene is at all reliable, she has no children to support.
You Hate the Rich. This is Class Warfare.
Let's get one thing straight: the rich are God's children just like us and I don't hate them. Are they swindling us and ruining American democracy? Fer sure. But put away those guillotines (sp?). We're talking non-violent resistance--financial transaction taxes, equalizing tax rates for earned and unearned income, truly progressive taxation rates, fair inheritance taxes, and repeal of the carried interest loophole (and whole ranges of other unfair tax policies).
Believe me, the rich will be far better off once we restrain their unearned, unfair, unreal advantages. They might even get a little empathy for the lowest paid among us.
No comments:
Post a Comment