I pity you, as well as the millions of other saps who have fallen for the myth of the American Dream and a meritocratic system when in actuality we very much live in a dynastic oligarchy with far less class mobility than we’ve been led to believe.
If those “exceedingly rare” “old money billionaires” are so few and insignificant, why is the capital gains tax still a flat 15% while the rest of us chumps who make chicken scratch in comparison pay a far higher percentage in income tax? What would be wrong with upping the estate tax for estates valued over $5M to near-100%? It would hardly affect anyone, and certainly not those people who “work so hard” for their $250K+ incomes, since they earned it all by themselves (according to you), right?
There are quite a lot of people out there who make money just by having money (and/or connections that their wealthy families have afforded them). And tons more like Gates and Trump (those are hardly isolated examples) who did work hard to build an empire, but they were only able to do so because they were born into wealth in the first place. Ever notice that virtually every politician that gets into the upper echelons of political power comes from a wealthy family full of bankers and lawyers? It’s not because they all built themselves from scratch - it’s because they knew the right people and had the cash necessary to get there.
Cite for what? That they did well in school or that they worked hard at their jobs?
And I pity you, as well as the millions of other saps who have fallen for the myth that you can never get ahead and the only way you’ll ever have anything in life is for the government to take it from someone else and give it to you.
You have as much mobility as you’re willing to expoit. You are perfectly free to start a business of your own or go to school and learn the skills you need to make yourself more valuable to the marketplace. You can work hard at your job and take on responsibility and learn as much as you can about not only your own job but those above you, and thereby put yourself in position for advancement or a job with another company in your industry. There is all sorts of opportunity out there for those who are willing to pursue it. The fact that you feel you have no opportunity for advancement leads me to believe that the real problem is you have no confidence in yourself.
Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s because the government wanted to stimulate investment in areas that would produce capital gains.
What would be wrong with it is almost everything. It’s confiscatory, usurporious, and exceedingly unfair. People earned that money themselves, it’s already been taxed, and they should have every right to pass it on to their heirs, give it all to charity, or do whatever they want with it. It’s there’s, not yours, and neither you nor the government has any right to it. Where is it written that people have a right to money they earned themselves? If my father is Mr. Gottrocks and he wants to leave me a cool bil, then he has every right to do that and it’s none of your business, just like it’s none of anyone else’s business what you choose to do with your estate. Attitudes like the one you just expressed are based on nothing but jealousy, resentment and envy. You have neither a moral nor legal right to that much of someone else’s money and it doesn’t matter one whit whether they earned it or inherited it. It’s theirs, not yours, and no matter how much you try to convince yourself that you deserve some of it, you don’t. You’d be a lot better off trying to find some way in life to become a producer and make it on your own rather than trying to find ways to suck up as much as you can of what someone else has earned.
Bill Gates and Donald Trump both are very intelligent workaholics. Neither cares a whit about a social life. Their work is their life, and they live it almost all the time. Sure, Gates lucked out primarily due to his mother’s banking connections which then led to his creating of an operating system for IBM, but he had the goods to take that luck and make it pay off for him in ways that no one else could have dreamed of. And yes, Trump inherited $20 million or so from his father, but for every guy like Trump who multiplies their inheritance many times over, I could show you countless others who either spend it all on hookers and blow, or get in over their heads and lose everything on bad investments made through bad advice which they didn’t have the savvy to recognize. Gates and Trump are both almost totally responsible for their wealth, because they were able to take relatively small bits of luck and capitalize on them in ways that almost nobody else would be able to do.
What I notice is that the politicians in the upper realms of power amount to a few hundred people. Given that this country’s population is 300 million I don’t think that there is much to be learned from their personal financial circumstances, nor do I think that our lives are negatively impacted in any way because they had money while growing up. Some people have more than others and that’s all there is to it. Some people are taller, soem are more athletic, some are better looking, some get all the girls and some get lots of money. You’d be a lot better served to quit looking at what other people have and just go through life with blinders on, living your own life and doing the best you can with it, rather than looking at who else has the most and feeling gypped somehow because that ain’t you.
You have to work for minimum wage, too. There aren’t a lot of jobs where they hand you money for not working.
There are quite a few people, including some right here in this thread, who will tell you that $250,000 per year is a modestly above average salary. It’s “upper middle class”, not “rich”. If I were gullible enough to fall for that, I might well think that $250k/year is or should be within the grasp of actual middle class people who are only somewhat above average. If it bothers you so much that there are people out there who don’t believe that earning $250k a year is something that can only be achieved by rare individuals with special skills, talk to those who keep trying to downplay how much money $250k a year is and how unusual it is for anyone to have such a large income.
All of which are legitimate reasons for reform, and electing people with both the stomach and the will to do it.
But they’re not legitimate reasons to defund the government in a snit about how it does things wrong, thereby preventing reform and crippling all the things that it does right.
See, that’s the problem, the assumption. People point out to you that class mobility is a myth, and you automatically jump to some idea of confiscatory taxes and imaginary government handouts.
No one said a word about government handouts except you. But the fact is, there are not huge numbers of people who are penniless who are on the verge of riches. There never have been, and with the extreme jump in the income and wealth gap in the years of economic downtown, it’s not likely that there will be, at least not in our lifetimes.
And we know, from empirical studies, especially Understanding Mobility in America by Tom Hertz at American University (which was concluded before the recent downturn) that people by and large end up in the same socioeconomic class as their parents.
An adult now who was born to parents in the lowest 20% of earners has a 1% chance of being in the top 5% of earners (which starts in the range of $108,000, much lower than the magic $250k number) in his lifetime. That chance is less than .5% if that person isn’t white.
An adult who was born to parents in the top 5% of earners has a 72% chance of remaining in the top quartile of earners through their lifetime.
Only 9.3% of those born in the lowest 25% of earners (lowest quartile) will attain earnings in the highest 25% in their lifetime. Fewer than 1 in 10.
46% of those born in the lowest quartile will stay there their entire lives. 63% if they’re black.
The factors which determine if someone will attain success out of proportion of their family of origin are largely in place before they’re ever born, based upon who their parents are, how educated* they* are, how healthy they are, where they live, and their race.
Is it impossible to become Bill Gates when you are born poor? No. Is it likely? Not by any reasonable understanding of that word.
Household income, yes. I don’t consider ourselves “rich” except relatively - but we are “well off.” (Rich to me means not having to work and still being able to fly first class, have someone clean your house for you, buy a new luxury car every year - we certainly can’t do that. We live in a middle class house in a middle class suburb, send our kids to public schools, shop at Kohls and Pennys (my work warddrobe does come from Nordstrom - but usually Nordstrom Rack), mow our own lawn and clean our own house (I have paid people to do this in the past when the kids were little)). Support paying additional taxes in conjunction with cuts - I think both ends need to be worked to get us out of this. Do not support additional income taxes on those that don’t pay income taxes - they generally pay plenty in FICA and sales taxes - and having lived poor, I remember needing every penny I had to pay rent, keep the heat over 62 degrees in the winter, and buy my off brand mac n cheese, jiffy cornbread mix, and monthly bus pass - I don’t want my taxes increased to the point where I have to start buying off brand mac n cheese, but my budget has way more room in it and way more luxuries than it did back then. Have overpaid my taxes (most years) for years.
A lawyer making $250k still works at the whim of his employer. That’s why he’s upper middle class. Rich people have enough money to do as they please.
And at $250k a year, you aren’t buying Bugatti racers and Gulfstream jets.
Of course you need special skill and ability to earn that much. Look at the jobs that pay that kind of money - investment bankers, lawyers, doctors, executives in companies, top entertainers and athletes, some entrepreneurs. It’s not like any idiot off the street can do that.
What the left doesn’t understand about opposition to taxes is that it is as much about the money itself as it is about what the government is likely to do with it. You can argue that someone taking that viewpoint should give his money to charity rather than let it go in taxes, but a lot of charities are the same way, even ones you set up yourself. I really doubt Henry Ford intended the Ford Foundation to fund abortions.
What most people either don’t understand, or if they do understand it find it distasteful, is the exponential difference in ability between different people. As George Carlin said, most people aren’t particularly good at anything. The modern economy and lifestyle owe almost everything to a small number of innovators like Bell, Edison, the Wrights, Jobs, and others less known. Then you go down the scale to the competent implementers like Ford, Hewlett and Packard, etc. The income of people like that may be appalling to some people, but beating up on them is going to hurt humanity more than it’s going to hurt them.
No, that’s “independently wealthy”. It is not the standard definition of “rich”, which simply means having a lot of money. The fourth quintile of American households (not individuals) begins around $60k/year and tops out around $90k/year. That is upper middle class.
Well, boo fucking hoo for the rich people who aren’t rich enough to afford private jets. They can comfort themselves with the knowledge that they still make more money than 98% of American households.
Like I said, “If it bothers you so much that there are people out there who don’t believe that earning $250k a year is something that can only be achieved by rare individuals with special skills, talk to those who keep trying to downplay how much money $250k a year is and how unusual it is for anyone to have such a large income.” *I’m *not the one trying to pretend that $250k a year is merely “upper middle class”. If it were upper middle class then a lot more people would have that much money, but they don’t so it isn’t.
No, nor was I basing the figures above on the Midwest. I did say “American households”. I got my numbers from the US Census: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032005/hhinc/new05_000.htm. Those numbers are from 2004, so I rounded up a bit to account for inflation. The exact figure they give for the lower limit of the fourth quintile is $55,331/year, with the lower limit for the top quintile being $88,030/year. $157,176/year or above would put a household in the top 5% in 2004.
That is specifically the Merriam-Webster definition. The same dictionary defines “abundant” as “marked by great plenty” or “amply supplied” and “lot” as “considerable quantity”. I’m not seeing any great difference in meaning there.
The OED, which is my go-to dictionary, defines rich as “having much money or abundant assets”. Please feel free to read “a lot of money” in my post above as “much money”, although I think that particular phrasing sounds awkward.
I know all of that. What I didn’t know was that anyone could live on either coast and not be aware there are large areas where your American household would only be middle class on $250K due to the cost of living in that area. Trying to establish middle class for any given area using an average of the numbers from the whole country just doesn’t work. Look at housing costs for example, or the cost of a gallon of gas.
And you used numbers from seven years ago and only rounded up a bit? Yeah, OK.
The innumerancy is dazzling in this thread. Half of American households earn under $50k per year. Half. Under. As in less than. I’m pretty sure they’d all agree that $250k per year is rich.
“In terms of region the median household income was as follows: “Northeast ($47,994), West ($47,680) and South ($40,773).” Median household income in the Mid-West declined by 2.8% to $44,657.” link Gosh, the difference between the midwest and the highest (northeast) is a whopping $3k. Half the people living in the northeast and west must be starving to death based on the huuuuuuge disparity in cost of living that’s been implied in this thread. :rolleyes:
What’s the dollar value of abundant? A million dollars in assets? That’s 5% of all American households. How about the 1% club, with 5 million in assets?
That doesn’t answer my question. What is the dollar value of rich?
Those people are practically paupers, since middle class seems to mean everyone who doesn’t have a jet. Or, we could define rich as those in the top 5% or 10%. I’ll even settle for the top 2%. You know, those earning more than $250k per year.
I’d say its above $5M in assets before you have “abundant” assets. I need $500k just to put my kids through college (private or out of state four year bachelors degree, housing expenses, books. If they go in state to a state school we will need slightly less than HALF of that). We make too much money to have a hope in hell of getting any financial aid. Plus I’ll need retirement income - and since I think means testing is likely by the time I retire to make SS sustainable, I’d better plan on saving every penny I’ll need in retirement - the interest on $1M in savings won’t pay my health insurance in retirement (and I won’t get Medicare either until I spend every penny I have). I’ll need far more than $1M in assets before I can afford all the obligations I have to support myself for the rest of my life and turn my kids into independent adults.
There are a HUGE number of Americans who are well off and financially secure. But they aren’t Scrooge McDuck or Richy Rich. They aren’t even real people like Bill Gates or Tiger Woods or Angelina Jolie or Jack Welch or Jay Leno or Larry Ellison. That is FAR less than 1% of Americans. And the distance between me and them is farther than the distance between the me who lived of $7k a year in a studio apartment where “don’t step on the heroin needles as you leave” and the current me.
Instead of asking people “is $250k a year rich?”, ask people what “rich” people do. Where “rich” people live. What “rich” people drive. People making $250k a year don’t do those things. Not if they are smart. Because $250k a year is enough to have “abundant” resources for the current year. It isn’t enough to have abundant resources for long if you stop making it - which eventually, most of us working stiffs do.
But I still think I should be taxed more. I’m well off enough to afford a bigger share of the tax burden. I just take exception to the word “rich” - I’m not rich - I certainly don’t feel rich when I clip coupons, tell my kids we will do their back to school shopping in October because its cheaper, or get rid of cable because its an expense we can’t really afford if we want to have our kids leave college without student loans - just better able to make sacrifices.
(And I think we need to work like HELL to protect SS and financial aid for people who aren’t me - because the numbers I’m facing because I don’t think we’ll be eligible for either are pretty huge.)
Need??? ROFL. I couldn’t read past that because I was laughing too hard. I won’t bother with the rest of your post since nothing I could ever say would get through that much entitlement.
I would be happy to look at whatever cites you have to support your claim that there are large areas of the country where a household income of $250k/year would put one in the middle quintile.
You’re welcome to provide your own figures, if you’ve got them.
Sorry my cite wasn’t as up to date as yours. Oh wait, you don’t have one.
It’s true that I did underestimate the rate of inflation. The inflation calculator here gives me an inflation rate of 21.88% from January 2004 to June 2011 (the most recent month it can handle). Using the same tool, here are the adjusted figures for my post above:
Bottom of the fourth quintile: $67,437.42 per year
Bottom of the fifth quintile: $107,290.96 per year
Bottom of the top 5%: $191,566.11 per year
So it looks like even with inflation $250,000 per year is still well within the top 5% of American households, and more than double the income one would need to fall within the top quintile.