The poor dears!

Source

This article is hilarious. Some guy at the Wall Street Journal has decided that, never mind the tens of millions of people in the world not sure where the next meal's coming from, or the millions in the U.S. who've been forced into bankruptcy through inability to pay medical bills, or who are living on food stamps and sleeping in their cars - what we should really reserve our worry and sympathy for are those poor dears earning more than $250,000 a year who can barely afford to buy nice clothes after paying the mortgage on their second homes. Taking the biscuit is the blissfully oblivious Ellen Parnell, who says: "What I want is a reality check on what rich means". Here's a hint, Ellen: you earn more than 95% of people in the United States do, never mind well over 99% of people in the world. You're it.

Comments

adamw wrote on 2009-04-20 06:16:
clarification in case the bizarro world of american politics comes knocking: the point here isn't whether people "deserve" the money they make, or whether it's morally correct to tax them 3% more or less (which, as someone on p.g.o - I forget who, may have been Luis - perceptively pointed out, is a ridiculous argument; a difference of 40% in your tax rate is a moral debate, a difference of 4% is an administrative dispute). The point is just that the tone of the article and particularly the people quoted in it is unintentionally and sadly funny. You really need to be terminally out of the touch with the world, or even the country, in which you live to believe that when you make more than 95% of the rest of the population, you're "barely getting by". On an admonitory note: anyone who makes that much money and is genuinely worried about a 3% change in the marginal tax rate is mismanaging their finances to an absurd degree...anyone on an income of that level should be living in such a way that they can absorb a change in income of a hell of a lot more than that.