With a working MD for a wife…no he didnt.
I know you’re having fun, JM, but if you did only just realize that you’re not one of the 1%, i think that actually says something about the whole state of American assumptions about politics and economics.
You’re clearly a smart and well-informed person, and you obviously do pretty well financially. But you weren’t even sure what it took to be in the top 1%, and you thought you were one of them instead of one of us. Americans are nothing if not optimistic, and one of the things that tends to work against tax increases for the super-rich and other measures to distribute wealth more equitably is that many people think that they have a decent shot at someday being part of the 1%.
But despite the fact that it’s quite easy to find stories of people who rose from nothing to have it all, the fact is that those folks form a miniscule minority. Despite the myth of opportunity and upward mobility, the fact is that the vast majority of Americans have no shot at ever being in the 1%, by definition. One percent is 1 in 100, no matter how you slice it, and 99 will always fall short.
We actually inculcate this idea in schools, where economics and finance are often taught as games without consequences, and things like stocks and shares are approached as a short-term game where the goal is to make a million as quickly as possible. In my own work, which is on the teaching of economics in American schools since World War II, i’ve come across this quite a bit. It gives kids unrealistic expectations of what the economy is all about, and an unrealistic vision of how much they’re likely to earn. Somewhere in my filing cabinet are notes about a survey done by Junior Achievement (in about 2001, i think) which found that about 15% of school-age teens expect to earn $1 million per year during their adult life. The actual number of people who earn this amount is closer to 1 in 1,000 than to 1 in 7.
I’m not saying that we need to present a bleak and pessimistic view, or that upward mobility is impossible, Far from it. But too many Americans, i think, are completely deluded about their actual chances of making it into the top 1%, or even the top 10%.
mhendo: I find the whole 1%/99% dichotomy to be entirely arbitrary. It’'s certainly a great marketing tool for the protests, but in reality it’s similar to the recent date when the estimated world population was exactly 7B. I just did a little googling, and found that I’m in the top 2%. I don’t think that, alone, makes me have any sense of solidarity with the protesters. And I’m not about to dump on the 1-percenters for no other reason than that they are in that income group.
My point is not about “dumping on” them. It’s about unrealistic expectations and their consequences for policy. When people on high 5-figure and low 6-figure incomes identify more with the 1% than with the 99%, we end up with situations where voters are unwilling to countenance tax increases for multimillionaires even as middle-income earners are bearing a larger portion of the tax burden and public services are being gutted for a lack of revenue.
And, despite the fact that the 1%ers have one vote at the ballot box, just like the rest of us, they have a disproportionate number of votes where it really matters: in paying lobbyists and donating to politicians and in getting direct access to legislators on a day-to-day basis. And these are precisely the sorts of things that the Occupy movement is talking about.
I know it sometimes makes the opponents of Occupy feel better to paint the movement as completely incoherent and aimless, and it’s true that there is no one spokesperson for the protests and no official policy document, but the issues that animate the movement have a lot to do with questions of equitable treatment and opportunity, not just equal outcomes. No-one is calling for people making a couple of hundred grand a year to have their assets stripped and handed out to the poor. This is not, despite the best (worst?) efforts of the media to portray it as such, an anarchist movement
Just for the record, I don’t “identify” with any group. In fact, my noting that I’m either in the 1-percent group or nearly so is that I couldn’t imagine diverting part of my net worth into a lobbying effort. I’m in the group, or nearly so, and yet I have nothing in common with the stereotype. I’m pretty disdainful of all politicians, and just get my vote out there like all the 99-percenters.
There is a subset of our society that is fully invested in the whole Lobbying business, and I’m more upset at the politicians who sell out to the Lobbyist than I am at the Lobbyists themselves. I also don’t think the what is wrong with the economy is something that can be “fixed” by Wash DC. And if we went back to the type of lobbying that we had 20 or 40 years ago (back in the “good old days”), I don’t see how that would significantly effect the state of the economy one way or the other.
The problem, Mhendo is that they don’t offer any credible alternative. Sure they rehash and respin various degrees of socialism and Utopianism but they simply aren’t credible. We are slowly increasing opportunity in this country but it will take a while. And somethings open ended opportunity is too much of a good thing. Just look at the housing crisis.
If you actually believe all of that, there’s no point in even discussing this with you. It’s you who are not credible.
Its an act of faith, isn’t it? A faith in people, a faith that if enough people want to move towards justice and equality, a way can be found.
It takes a page from Gandhi. Hard headed realistic people loved to point out to him that his non-violent tactics would not work with Hitler. And he answered to the efect that it was true, but he wasn’t dealing with Hitler, he was dealing with the English, who were at bottom and decent and just people. And if decent and just people are forced to confront the effects of their actions, they will change.
That is their plan. That is the agenda. Such as it is.
Actually I can see how that might work.
Um, no you can’t, because bankers are putatively professionals in the financial industry, ordinary people are, well, ordinary people. One has a professional responsibility to lend responsibly, the other should be smart about loans but they are still just regular folks. You are comparing apples to oranges here. Stop it.
One problem I have with all these tax-the-rich schemes is that they generally focus their slogans on super-rich people but once the dam is breached they end up socking it to the middle class or at least the upper middle class.
People who have run the numbers have observed that there aren’t enough super-rich people to pay up the deficit, even if all their income was taxed at 100%.
You don’t need to have a conspiracy to have a confluence of interests that run directly counter to the common good, a situation which describes the top 1% well.
Has this ever actually happened? Or is this just conservatives groundless fears? Cite please.
No one, certainly not Democrats in Congress, have ever suggested that millionaire tax increases alone would eliminate the deficit.
Over time, a better tax structure and better fiscal policy would. Why do some people defend obviously failed ideas with such vigor?
I ask myself that constantly when looking at economic oriented threads on this board. It’s a puzzlement, no doubt…
-XT
Given the generally high standards of living that most people in the US enjoy I’m not sure it has failed all that badly.
A simplified tax code would help and I’m all for it but really, taxing someone like me another ten percent or more really isn’t going to help you much. You may think it will but it won’t. The money will be wasted. Whether you like it or not for any of this to work errrr has to be concessions on both sides.
I do and you saying otherwise doesn’t change my point of view. Even wight further tax increases my life style wont change appreciably. I may reconsider some planned investments but that’s really about it. I’m not sure how that will help the economy. We need to expand opportunities and I’ve seen no credible alternative from the occupy movement. If you have then please share.
Expanding opportunities is about the easiest shit in the world here, all a person has to do is be a CEO who gives a rat’s ass.
Consider this, and we’re speaking in dollars adjusted to 2011.
In 1965, the average hourly wage worker made about $20 an hour (around 40,000/yr). The average CEO made about 25 times as much, close to $490 (around $1,000,000/yr) .
In 2007, the average worker still made about $20 an hour in adjusted dollars. The average CEO made about 270 times that much, around $5420 ($11.27m/yr).
To a lot of us in the 99% (and I’m in John Mace’s boat here–I’m in the single-digits myself), that looks like 250 more jobs per CEO that decides the economy is more important than his fifteenth gold-plated yacht, and dials it back to merely 1960s standards.
To a lot of us in the 99% that understand supply and demand, 250 people at 40,000 and 1 guy at 1 million are going to buy at least 251 cars. One guy at 11 million and 250 out of work guys are not going to buy substantially fewer than that. Extrapolate as needed. The difference is the former leads to an expanding economy where more people can buy more goods, and the latter leads to a bunch of people not having anything and a stagnant, low-demand economy.
The guy I work for is one of the 1%. He makes a lot less than 25 times the average worker here, because he’s not an idiot.
Gah, I hate it when I notice a typo hours later. “One guy at 11 million and 250 out of work guys are [del]not[/del] going to buy substantially fewer than that.”
Zeriel: I’m on an iPad and I feel your pain re typos. Will respond to the rest of your post as soon as possible…from a PC as I can’t cut and paste quotes very well from my iPad.