| See, this is what kills me. Here everyone is arguing about what's middle class and what's not - and the amount we've chosen to argue about is $200K vs
40K, more or less. Yet I mention the hedge fund manager who made $3 billion in 2007, and no one seemed to notice.
Rather than argue about who's middle class or not (and we've already shown that middle income in one part of the country can be different in another part of the country) - why aren't we as a society arguing about a living wage? Continue to argue that we're middle, and those families that make 200K, well they're rich. While people with $300,000 could go bankrupt tomorrow if their child needs a bone marrow transplant that the insurance company refuses to pay for.
Why is it that a CEO can get a multi-million dollar raise for improving the bottom line of the company by laying off workers? How creative is that? Did it take a lot of business acumen to figure that one out? And then he/she gets fired the next year because the underlying business model is screwed up, and their margin doesn't improve the next year. But the CEO leaves with the multi-million bonus he got last year, plus millions more in severance pay.
Why is it that a person working 40 hours a week at a regular job, is not earning a living wage? I always used to think that an honest day's labor should get an honest paycheck. But the difference between the guy at the top and the guy at the bottom is getting wider and wider every day.
Why do we continue to give tax breaks to corporations which move their headquarters to Bermuda or Dubai? I don't get it.
So go ahead and continue to argue about who's middle class and who's rich, while the country continues on its way to eventually having the hugely rich and the abjectly poor, with India becoming our true middle class. |