Saturday, January 18, 2014

A Person Making $500,000 A Year Has More In Common With The Poors Than The Billionaires

Identifying with the plutocrats won't help you
Educating my relatively successful peers is one of the greatest challenges of all.  For the most part, they just don't want to hear it. 

And why not? They've been fed propaganda their entire lives.  But the reality, my doctor and lawyer friends, is you have far more in common with Mike the janitor than with Mike Bloomberg.  And you better figure that out quickly.
"He goes on to make the point that the 99% vs the 1% Occupy slogan was brilliant in this regard (although he would say that the real problem is more like the .001%.) I agree. The key was to understand that Americans don't resent people who do well. Or even people who do really well. The problem isn't the upper middle class or even the "normal" wealthy. It's these gilded age monsters at the very top who are scarfing up more and more of the wealth at the expense of all the rest of us. Paradoxically, I think the poor and middle class may understand this instinctively while it's the upper middles who may need the educating. I'm sure they are loathe to be lumped in with the crude, undisciplined proles, but to these ultra-wealthy plutocrats, that's exactly what they are."

Our Second Gilded Age.

2 comments:

Dr. Steve said...

The only people who are 'scarfing up' everyone else's wealth are crooks. Honest rich people add to the economy, they don't subtract anything from it.
You think Thomas Edison made the economy weaker by producing light bulbs or Bell with his phone or Vanderbilt by opening up the west with railroads, etc.?
www.ThePointingFinger.blogspot.com

Gary said...

"Educating my relatively successful peers is one of the greatest challenges of all. For the most part, they just don't want to hear it.

And why not? They've been fed propaganda their entire lives."

Exhibit A, above.