procrastinaters.com

1 of 3 - Cleaning up the Rhetoric of the 1%:

One of the most legitimate points that have been made in the Republican debates is about how people don’t understand that most millionaires (I forget the exact figure) are only a millionaire for a year.  That they work very hard to get to that point, and most of the time it is not replicated in the following year. 

What people don’t like to recognize is that $1M does not make you set for life; it’s actually only 1/3^rd of being set for life as a median incomer.  Also, it should be noted that the median incomer isn’t in great shape these days in theUS and they pretty much live life perpetually in debt.  So even if the 1-millionaire made 3x’s as much, they’d still only have enough to be barely in the red for their entire life. 

I mean, don’t get me wrong, making in one year 1/3^rd as much as the average Joe makes in 60 years of working fulltime is very nice, but they’re not exactly hoarding all of the nation’s wealth for themselves and their children and their children’s children.

What people might be interested to recognize, though, is how much $42 million is.  The simple math says that it’s 42 times as much as $1M (I did that in my head).  Slightly less simple but still pretty simple math says that that’s 1,400% of 60 years worth of median income!*  So remember that millionaire that I was just defending who makes a sizeable fraction of what most people make in their whole life?  Well, Romney laughs at that, making what 14 people make combined over the entirety of their 60-year career.

Another way to put it is to point out how many of the reports are rounding off the “0.6” at the end of the figure (he actually made $42.6M).  Well, that $0.6M, that thing that’s almost literally a rounding error, is $300k per year spread over the two years.  In other words, if Mitt Romney made 42 million dollars less than he actually did, he would still be in the 1% .

Are you digesting all of this?  

And, oh by the way, there is something called billionaires, and these people make at least 24x’s this!  That means that they could have two kids and a wife, and each of their kids could have two kids and a wife, and each of them could have two kids and a wife and that could go on for 6 generations (with the final generation having 128 kids) with no one for that entire 2+ century span ever having a job, and every single member of that family would still have almost 40% more wealth than the head of the average household has (note: that’s just the head of the household, where my maths actually account for the father, mother AND the two children of every single family making that much for 60 years).

I understand that most people who got wealthy, got wealthy because of skills, risks, hard work, etc, and that’s not my point.

My point is that, truly, I don’t care about the 1%; I don’t even care about millionaires who make up less than half of the 1%. 

Note: Have you noticed that we’ve been using the term millionaires since all the way back when hamburgers were a nickel?  Do you realize how flawed it is to continue to use this terminology in the exact same manner in spite of the massive change in the literal value of a million dollars? 

No, it’s not about them.  It’s about the people who were millionaires back when hamburgers were a nickel.  Let’s see, more simple math tells me that since hamburgers are now more like $2.50 that we should be talking about people at the 50 million mark.  But I’ll give you the MASSIVE benefit of the doubt and just talk about deca-millionaires. 

I realize that in my introduction I said that this really doesn’t have all that much to do with Romney, yet I spent the entirety of this first bit talking about how much money he made.  Well, GET OVER IT! 

Nah, just playin.  It’s just that it’s a good entry point to the discussion of what rich really is, and how I don’t have a problem with people who make way more than the average American.  In fact, I have no problem with people who make way way more than the people who make way more than the average American . . . they should probably just be paying more than 60% of what the average American pays in taxes.  (Aaaand it’s at least salient from a poetic fittingness point of view that this is true of someone who is running for president on the plank of keeping the tax system status quo).

People representing that vast an amount of wealth is just unsustai—wait a minute, I’ll stop right there.  All that is for a different post.