I love listening to rich people's problems. And we're not talking about the hard-working individuals who got a break and went to school and landed a well-paying job. We're talking about the cut-throat executives who managed to achieve the American Dream by stepping on people's faces and paying their employees minimum wage so they could earn $4,000,000 a year.
For example, we've heard them complain about their taxes being threatened to be raised—let's say to 40% of their income—whereas low-income individuals are only taxed a meager amount if at all. “Our dollar isn't worth as much as other people's dollar,” whine the rich. That is correct. Your dollar isn't worth as much. In fact, let's do the math together:
Say a widow has ten dollars. She gives one dollar to charity. She is sacrificing 10% of her worth. On the other hand, if a millionaire gives a dollar to charity, his dollar is worth only 0.0001% of his wealth. In order to make a contribution equal to the widow's he would have to donate $100,000 to charity. His dollar is worth only 1/10000th what hers is worth. Not fair.
- Carly
3 comments:
I see what your going at, and I do agree that some people are not grateful for what they do have, and that is a problem. A huge problem. And, their is corruption among the rich, but I actually have STRONG feelings about taxing the rich, and I thought I'd share the economic example that makes me feel this way:
"In Maryland...the Democratic state government couldn’t balance the budget in 2009, so it decided to double the income tax rate on citizens with more than $1 million in annual income...What kind of smart, hard-working citizen is going to give the government more than half his income if he can move somewhere else and pay substantially less?...
..editorial board at the Baltimore Sun happily praised the measure and predicted Maryland’s top earners would 'grin and bear it.'
...Instead, the rich left town. The number of million-dollar incomes in the state of Maryland declined by more than 30%, from 3,000 filers to only 2,000. Rather than gain- ing the predicted $106 million in income from these filers, Maryland collected $100 million less than it did the year before." (Stansberry’s Investment Advisory: Volume 13, Issue 5, December 2011)
I find this interesting. It's like the opposite of the example where taco bell dropped their taco prices significantly, and actually profited MORE even though their profit margin was smaller, because they sold so many more tacos than before. Sometimes raising taxes on the rich (whether the good rich people, or the bad rich people), actually hurts the community in the end...
I used the wrong their there, and probably more. I need to proofread before I post things :)
I love that you used a reference for your example! (Journalism needs to do more of that.) True. There is a balance to raising taxes. BTW, months after writing this blogpost, I discovered that I had completely misunderstood how marginal income taxes work. I guess if the top tax bracket is 40%, that doesn't mean the millionaires keep only 60% of their income. (I discovered this after being perplexed how the top income bracket could be 94% from 1944-1945. I was like, how on earth could millionaires survive on only 6% of their income!) So my little blog post has an embarrassing little blunder...however, I've discovered that most people wouldn't catch it.
Post a Comment