How much of their money is money they worked for, and how much is money they collected because of what they own (like the sports team owners)?
They seem kind of flabby, and most of them are pretty old. Not really the best eatin’, if you catch my drift.
Did they, though? Bill Gates has certainly put in many hours into his business in comparison to the average 40 hr/week workers, and he’s made shrewd (some would say vicious and unscrupulous) business decisions, but the vast majority of intellectual work in developing the products, processes, and promotion that made Microsoft a titan of the software industry were done by others. Warrant Buffett has made very astute investment decisions that have yielded very large gains, but it isn’t as if he put in an hour of manual labor to manufacture, distribute, or sell anything. Sam Walton discovered a niche and used it to bring cheap (mostly foreign made) goods to average workers for a discount price, but he didn’t work in the factories that produced them or on the floors of the stores where his minimum age workers sold them. (BTW, I met Sam Walton, who was a pleasant, humble, and non-ostentatious guy, but let’s not pretend that what has become his empire hadn’t been exploitative of employees and suppliers.)
Certainly, they deserve to enjoy the fruits of their efforts and fortune, but it should also be recognized that none would ever have had the chance to build their financial empires and earn such wealth if it weren’t for the infrastructure that was provided gratis for them; not just roads and telecommunications, but the government investment in technology research, education, and regulation that was used to their advantage. The idea that they owe only the same nominal contribution back as the average taxpayer (notwithstanding how the very wealthy can shield their income and wealth from taxes though mechanisms not available to even upper middle class people) is akin to suggesting that there is a princely class that everyone else should be privileged to support, if not directly than by redistribution of what little disposable income they have to the wealthy.
And sure, billionaires contribute far more to philanthropy than the middle class does or ever could. But again, even setting aside the tax benefits of doing so, the wealthy have vastly more disposable income to do so, often to the end of elevating their names and legacy, and in the case of Bill Gates, overtly striving to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Do we really have to fête billionaires for attempting to win awards for being wealthy and privileged?
Stranger
Those lucky duckies in the bottom 50%!
https://gocomics.typepad.com/tomthedancingbugblog/2010/07/lucky-ducky-day.html
Most owners of pro sports teams are successful businesspeople from other fields, who purchased the teams with money they had made in their original fields. Jerry Jones (Dallas Cowboys) made his money from oil and natural gas exploration; Paul Allen (who owned the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers before his death) was the co-founder, along with Bill Gates, of Microsoft; Robert Kraft (New England Patriots) made his money in paper and packaging.
There are still a few teams that are controlled by families which have owned them for many decades (dating back to when teams were far less valuable/expensive), like the McCaskeys (Chicago Bears) and Bidwills (Arizona Cardinals), for which the teams are their primary income, but there aren’t many of those anymore.
No doubt, and they are ‘special’. I think special people - the Bill Gates’, Warren Buffets, Steve Jobs of the world - should have more privilege than the rest of us. For the record, I’ve never believed in total, absolute equality. But the rest of us have to make it on the incomes we’ve got.
But blubber is a great source of protein and Vitamins C and D!
i always thought he he was of the Kraft cheese/food conglomerate
Looking at those numbers It appears moral and reasonable that we should drop tax on the lower 50% totally as that is only 3% anyway and they could really use any break they can get, and that’s money better used in their pocket then Uncle Sam’s, and impose that burden on the upper 1% as going from 40% to 43% will hardly noticeable for those who money is no object yet could make such a big difference in the federal coffers.
That’s an excellent point.
If we didn’t know that much of what kept our governments running was state and local taxes, sales tax, payroll taxes, gas & sin tax and various fees. Going by the numbers in the OP, might as well eliminate the federal income tax for half of all Americans.
I wonder how many in the 50% are kids and retirees just to further show how useless those numbers are by themselves.
So, just no acknowledgement about how misleading the numbers in your OP were? Nothing about falling for right-wing bullshit?
I can guarantee, that the average minimum wage housekeeper at a motel works harder every day than Warren Buffet ever did.
The rich. They aren’t working any harder now than they did in the past, but they’re gathering up far more wealth than in the past, AND paying less in tax.
That’s what the free ride means, they get more without doing more. You can’t really say that about the 50%, they’re still squeaking by, at best, and most of the value of their improved productivity is going to the rich.
The free market capitalist response to that would be that while the housekeeper puts in more physical effort, the ‘market’ value of Warren Buffett’s intellectual labor is much greater, and that if you swapped the two Buffett might do an inadequate job of cleaning and changing sheets but the housekeeper would be completely lost in making the kind of investment decisions that a talented and refined mind like Buffett’s allows for. And there is a certain merit to this point of view; people with unique talents or skills can command higher salaries or fees, and should be rewarded for what they can do to multiply value versus just an equivalency of labor hours because this is what promotes the economy to expand, (theoretically) feeds innovation, et cetera.
The reality, however, is that we have a class of people whose primary value is networking and trading amongst one another, often directly manipulating the supposed “free market” in ways that the average consumer could not hope to do, and accruing extraordinary wealth from the labor of other people (most of them overseas now so they are conveniently far away and firewalled off from directly employment for deniability of any circumstances of their poverty), and these same people can and have manipulated the tax system to avoid paying even a proportional share of taxes that go to infrastructure, education, and other government-provided services that allow their business or the businesses they invest in to be productive and profitable. They also work to both passively and actively deny others the opportunity to advance based upon merit; the college admissions scandals of a couple years ago is just the tip of the iceberg in how very wealthy people protect their generational wealth and promote their often insouciant children to positions of executive authority.
When you see a family like the Sacklers do enormous harm to millions of Americans in pursuit of their multi-billion dollar fortune and then get away with most of the money and without accepting any personal responsibility, you understand that there are, as they say, “different rules for the rich,” and not just for their table settings. The wealthy can buy and sell laws, bend or ignore regulation (Hey, Elon!), and generally do as they please as long as they pay off or use their influence to favor the right people. Even if you are hardcore, laissez-faire, live-free-or-die libertarian capitalist, this should offend you as anti-meritocratic and innately corrupt.
Getting back to the housekeeper, (almost) nobody is suggesting that she should receive the same paycheck or expect to be kept in the same style as Warren Buffett. But if she does a good day’s work at an honest job that provides measurable value (assuring that you have fresh sheets and a clean bathroom when you stay away from home) she ought to be able to expect basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing, and essential health care without having to work multiple jobs or scrap by from paycheck to paycheck. It is hilarious about all the whinging about people who don’t want to go back to work at shitty, low paying, unsecured jobs crucial to keep the economy running smoothly but who aren’t considered in any way essential or worthy of any employment protections. If Jeff Bezos can afford to fund a multi-billion dollar company so he can fulfill his boyhood dream of flying into suborbital space, he should be able to afford to let his warehouse workers take bathroom breaks and enjoy basic employment benefits.
Stranger
Yes to all of this. Thanks for the complete deconstruction of what I briefly hinted at.
The thing that really irks me is the just world hypothesis popular amoung Republicans that everyone is paid the amount that they deserve. If the poor are poor its because they made bad decisions or are just too lazy to put in the effort to pull themselves up by their boot straps.
As much as I want to do something to alleviate income disparity, I’m not crazy about the government getting that involved in setting compensation levels in the private sector.
Instead I would propose that the multiplier be much lower, say 50x, and that compensation paid to employees that exceeds 50x of the median full-time-equivalent income of the lowest paid 1% of their workforce cannot be deducted as an expense on the organization’s income taxes. If the median of the bottom 1% makes $30,000, then only the first $1.5 million paid to any senior executive would be deductible. The organization would still be free to pay that executive $3 million if they choose to do so.
While I agree with you in principle, I think you used a very bad example to represent the uberwealthy. Buffett specifically recommended raising tax on the wealthy and has famously said that a code that allows his secretary to be in the same tax bracket that he is in (due to exemptions and deductions the poor are not allowed) is clearly faulted.
In addition, he has provided for his children on a basic level and said he would not provide more for them they have not earned than those managers accountants who do the hard work of running his many businesses. He owns (or did at one time), one vehicle and it is a middling piece of Detroit metal (not an expensive sports or luxury car), and he often lunches at Dairy Queen.
It is claimed that he gets up early every day and comes into the office (he is about a thousand years old now, so it might not be strictly the case any longer) and does tons of reading about markets in general, and then does more mind numbingly boring research into companies he is contemplating investing in. There was a time when he had a HUGE pile of cash on hand because he could not find many domestic companies worth investing in. That cash “earning nothing” turned out to be a very wise decision later when everything tanked and he lost almost nothing.
That is because he works hard at what he does. Even if only half of what I believe to be true is actually true – that still makes him the most moral and humble billionaire by orders of magnitude. (And no disrespect to very socially aware wealthy Americans who do place a great deal of their fortunes into humanitarian efforts.)
I agree with this too and have this to add.
The example that is often used is the salary of professional athletes. In that case, the third string bench warmers make league minimum which is (okay, was when I actually paid attention) between a half million and a million dollars a year. So if someone get a a ten year contract worth a hundred million that is only a 10X difference per year. Sure the minimum salary guy has to make the team each year and has other challenges, but that is a reasonable difference for a guy who jumps ten feet in the air and grabs a game winning touchdown with eight seconds on the clock (or grabs a rebound that clinches the game).
In real life, a CEO can make hundreds or thousands times what a maid or fast food worker makes. A huge and unreasonable discrepancy.
Only if you define physical labor as “hard”, and intellectual work and stress as “easy”. We could debate those relativities forever but your comment throws more shade than light unless you acknowledge this element. Buffett is probably not a great example of the latter in the sense he made money early and probably hasn’t had to stress out too much since. But plenty of “mental workers” work hard, and spend a lot of time mentally stressed - the health detriments of which we are only beginning to understand.
I don’t have a lot to contribute to the thread in substantial manner but i would love to expound on this a bit. Working a minimum wage job that gives a measurable positive impact to society and the economy should at a bare minimum provide for these necessities while also allowing people to live a private life as well away from a simple subsistence. I don’t think it’s too much to allow this hypothetical maid an extra $100 a week or whatever to pursue a private hobby or indulge in an occasional luxury item such as a big screen tv. Or if not themselves maybe their family and children. It’s what allows people to see the economy is working for them and they’re not just a cog in a machine.
Agreed. If you’re working 60-70 hours a week just to get by, are you really free? Even if someone isn’t working quite that hard, people generally have a right to benefit from our technological advances and comforts. I don’t believe that the maid should expect to live in a posh penthouse on Park Ave but she has a right to have access to healthcare without fear of going bankrupt.
We may have different ideas of a “basic level.” The Washington Post says, “Buffett’s three kids each have a $2 billion foundation funded by Dear Old Dad.”