First lady Michelle Obama the other day railed at “the few at the top,” who do all sorts of bad things. A few months ago, we began hearing of the “1 percent” who are responsible for the current economic mess. “They” apparently make all their money at the expense of the other 99 percent. Are they the same as last year’s villains, who had not paid “their fair share” while making over $200,000 in annual income?
Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply and efficiently than farmers in almost any other part of the world, thereby enriching his county, state, and nation.
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I am writing this essay on a MacBook Pro laptop. So I wonder, was the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs a suspect billionaire? Should I be mad or grateful that he made billions by permanently replacing my old scissors, paste, and bottle of Liquid Paper of the 1970s?
Did Johnny Depp really have to earn $50 million last year alone — or Leonardo DiCaprio $77 million? Couldn’t they have settled for $2 million in salary in 2010, and thereby passed on a little bit of the savings to their ticket-buying fans? What kind of system would allow Oprah Winfrey or the late Michael Jackson each to accumulate nearly $1 billion? Is left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore — reportedly worth $50 million — a one-percenter? Why does such an enemy of capitalism need so much capitalist largesse?
Do this administration and its supporters really wish to separate millions of diverse Americans by a moral divide of the “few at the top”? Are liberals like Sens. John Kerry and Dianne Feinstein — among the richest in the U.S. Senate — in that elite group?
How about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, together worth over $100 billion? They are certainly philanthropists. But their charities are predicated on two assumptions: They both apparently trust the private sector more than government to administer their vast estates, and neither sees much of a problem in avoiding billions in inheritance taxes that would one day be due to a now-broke federal treasury.
Is George Soros a “corporate-jet owner”? He nearly broke the Bank of England by shorting the British pound and was convicted in France of insider training. Rather than comply with new federal financial-disclosure regulations, he told some of his outside investors just to keep their money. Is Obama’s former director of the budget, Peter Orszag, a “fat-cat banker”? He left the administration to enter the “revolving door” of Wall Street, where he is now a rich banker for Citigroup.
So do we really want to go down this them-vs.-us road? Using a new financial red line to crudely divide us is a tricky business. Those most likely to fly in corporate jets are precisely the elite who show up at the president’s mega-fundraisers and play golf with him on the world’s most exclusive courses — or visit Martha’s Vineyard and Vail, where the first family sometimes vacations. They don’t all wear pinstripes and Gucci, but may hang out at Occupy Wall Street rallies as actors, rappers, and filmmakers in jeans and baseball caps.
In a larger sense, we should remember a few things about the new orchestrated envy of, and animosity toward, the better-off. Most Americans each day depend on our medical care, our retirement packages, our food, our gas, and our computers from exactly these “few at the top” who seem to enrich rather than prey on society.
The BMWs or Porsches of the one-percenters aren’t that much faster, quieter, or safer than our Chevys and Hondas. Damning the wealthy nonstop is often an embarrassing symptom of one’s own longing for, even obsession with, the perks and attention that wealth brings. And if we really want more tax revenue, there is far more to be had from the nearly 50 percent of American households that pay no federal income tax than from the 1 percent that now pays 37 percent of all the collected revenue.
In short, a confident, successful society neither idolizes nor demonizes its rich, but instead believes that wealth can be created rather than taken from others. And it simply judges the better-off by the content of their characters, not the size of their wallets.
You let George Soros off too easily. As a result of his currency speculations, his greed and malice made hundreds of thousands of my fellow Britons homeless.
His wealth has quite literally been built on the misery of others.
I'm appalled at the idea of separating people from their millions, but if it was legal and Constitutional to target individuals to divest of their wealth Dr. Hanson has named a few who need to contribute more to the Federal coffers.
Hanson: "Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits?"
No.
But they do include those bankers and mortgage company CEOs (both at Fannie and Freddie and in the private sector) who issued lots of subprime mortgages to poor credit risks. And then turned right around and packaged up those mortgages into securities which they sold to investors as safe.
And it includes the rating agencies, Moody's and S&P, who deliberately overrated those securities as AAA when they were nowhere near that high in quality. These rating agencies are paid by the issuers of the securities themselves, a blatant conflict of interest. They had deals going where the more you paid them, the higher they rated your securities regardless of whether they deserved a high rating.
In short, the financial services industry included a large number of actual racketeers. When we conservatives speak of "job creators," we should make it clear that we mean men like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg who created tangible products and doctors who save lives, not financiers who are responsible for having crashed the U.S. economy.
Intriguing. the captcha was "know more. get better"
So the One percenter is not a one percenter on the objective basis of whether his or her income places him or her in the top 1% of the wealthy in this country, but, rather, by the subjective standard of whether his or her actions place him or her on the top 1% of those who've upset off? Good to know.
I'm not excusing those financiers that did that which you complain of. But, then, I'm not wandering around instead of working, complaining about some mythical slogan-ready group called the One Percent.
And if I may be so bold, thos nasty financiers whom you deem worthy of scorn were able to do what they did because they learned to play the system. The system, by the way, mostly labyrinthian because of excessive obfuscation resulting from thousands of regulations administrered by tens of thousands of bureaucrats susceptible to influence peddling and other nastiness. Take some of the more ridiculous regulations away, limit the amount of "oversight", reduce exponentially the number of corruptibles (and it only takes a percentage of those bureaucrats to mess up the works) and allow the transparency promised by He-Who-Shall-Remain-Raceless (lest I be accused of being a racist for merely disagreeing with his "solutions"), and the market would have found a way to crush the badguys you complain of.
A further quibble. Facebook is a tangible product? Wow, you bought into that kool aid readily. At best, it's a service. At worst, it's digital crack.
"The system, by the way, mostly labyrinthian because of excessive obfuscation resulting from thousands of regulations administrered by tens of thousands of bureaucrats susceptible to influence peddling and other nastiness."
Exactly. We have the best lawmakers money can buy. Those with the bucks make the laws (or have the laws made for them). This is one more symptom of the decadence of our political/economic system. The great wealth of the "1 percent" (or rather the influence of their great wealth) is rotting our political system from within, like a cancer. All part of the dialectic, you know, internal contradictions and all that.
"These rating agencies are paid by the issuers of the securities themselves, a blatant conflict of interest."
And why is that? Because the Government passed a law requiring all debt issuances to be rated by a selected cartel, just as they passed a law requiring banks to lend to low income borrowers, just as they req'd Fannie and Freddie to load up on liar loans...
See the connection? Why am I asking? Of course you don't...
The people who ultimately set prices are the buyers.
And the buyers were starving for fixed-income yields, because central banks around the world, following the Fed and the Bank of Japan, were keeping interest rates artificially low.
Poke around enough behind every major economic bust (as opposed to a garden-variety correction) and you will invariably see it all come back to the hand of an over-powerful, under-competent government.
I agree entirely with the points made in this essay, but I would offer a word of friendly advice: Mr. Hanson, it makes you sound shrill when you work in a reference to the Obamas' vacation haunts in every.single.column. I saw the title of this piece and thought, "There should be a drinking game tied to every utterance of 'Costa del Sol.'" You missed that one this time, but we hit Martha's Vineyard and Vail, as usual.
Mr. Hanson uses the vacation examples of the Obamas' frequent and opulent vacationing because it is an effective, pithy, visceral example that every American who hasn't been able to afford much of a vacation for their family the last few years can quickly understand. It is not Mr. Hanson's fault that every few months the Obamas, and particularly Queen Michelle, provide Mr. Hanson with a new example. He and others in the media should keep pointing to those examples until as many of the naive 2008 Obama voters as possible are forced to see the "let them eat cake" Obamas for who they really are, instead of the faux populists they pretend to be while the cameras are turned on for a staged shopping event at the local Target.
Mr. Hanson: You just don't understand. These people just care more about people than the rich Republicans. Therefore it is ok that they make this much money. Their money is infused with love and hope and change and unicorn milk, therefore it is pure and just. /sarc
Dr. Hanson is, of course, right on the mark with this article. Thinking Housewife can go play her drinking game but the juxtaposed truth hurts, doesn't it?
Does the wool actually belong to the sheep? It is the reason for their existence. Marxist doctrine holds that the worker owns the product of his labor, but capitalist doctrine holds that the investors pay for the labor and get the product in return. It seems clear which side of that fence you sit upon.
And, lest I be accused of not answering your query, yes, it is envy for the sheep to suddenly resent being shorn when the purpose of the sheep was to be shorn.
Ah, so the purpose of the working class (AKA the "99 percent") is to be treated as a flock of sheep, to be shorn to whatever extent their masters wish? Good, Iconoclast, I now know what side of the fence *you* are on.
What the "99%" offer is labor. That is what they are being shorn of. The value of that labor is set by market forces far better than by governmental fiat. What these particular 99%ers want is unlimited access to everything they want by virtue of existing. It doesn't work that way. They are rewarded for what they give, arguably unlike the sheep. The work, they get paid. It's really not that difficult a concept. What these folk want is, essentially, either more pay, or no need for any pay. It is a utopian pipedream, like all socialism. It works so long as there is wealth to steal. It stops working when there is none left. It can't work if those with the wealth don't allow it to be taken from them. These folks have developed a very communist, very marxist belief system. We are more, so we deserve more. They are actually, in that respect, almost identical to those they repudiate. They think they have power, and they think they are going to wield it to get what they want. Trouble is, they have no power. They appeal to compassion and illogic, but the reality is that in order for there to be largess, there must be profit. The cannot seem to make that basic connection. They naively think that sustenance falls like manna from heaven, and they childishly think they deserve it because they have done nothing wrong. Life doesn't work that way. You can just be sheep and get the world handed to you. So, to bring it full circle, these particular denizens of the alleged 99% majority are very very much like sheep. They bleat, and expect their basic needs to be taken care of. Only these are very very spoiled sheep, whose basic needs go far beyond anybodies concept of basic. Free college education to get a PhD in subliminal advertising symbology and the neo-feministic trangendered she creature. They have no shame, they have no sense of self worth, and they value themselves far too highly in the marketplace simply by virtue of being one of the seven billion other people on the planet. It isn't a question of master/servant. Try as you like, you can't make it that. It's a question of entitlement. The ultimate entitlement society disaster. Give so much to so many and everyone thinks life really is a box of chocolates. They should get down on their knees and thank God or whatever version of self-centered divinity they may believe in that there are enough other people currently out there to support them. But it won't last.
