I tried to ignore the whole Occupy Wall Street thing for as long as I could. At first, it seemed like any normal obnoxious protest – the sort that the Tea Party people have patented in the last few years. But longevity has proven to be the protesters biggest advantage. It allows them to leverage the fact that they’re unemployed and have no where else to be. Which is, incidentally, part of what they’re protesting about. It’s a perfect storm.
It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what they want – there is no unified theme other than general discontent, mostly centered on economic matters. By the way, correct me if I’m wrong here. If, for instance, they were to produce a modern day Magna Carta, limiting the rights of the Wall Street oligarchy, what would it say? I think if you asked, you’d get a smattering of suggestions, some contradictory, some absurd, but some reasonable if impossible to implement.
I happen to find it ridiculous that any employee of a company would be paid more than a million dollars a year. It’s different for the owner of a business – if he’s successful, he can’t help it. It’s different for an artist, author or athlete – they rightfully collect royalties for their goods or services. But to have a board of directors conspiring to sequester $200 million dollars of profit within their little holy huddle is sketchy. It’s not a free market, remember. Once you take a federal bail out, once you know that you’re “too big to fail”, you no longer need to invest in a way that ensures your future existence. You can toss around money carelessly. In addition, you can use your money as power, further insulating you for “fair” market pressures. There’s not much free market about voting for your own raises.
But the unions don’t really have it right either. This chart is an egregious example of manipulating statistics. Check out the time scale – instead of witnessing a precipitous drop in pay (which might make people think, “good, we’re fixing it”), you see a slow decline, which instead manipulates people’s opinion toward their point of view. Then, you create a chart like this, the number of workers who can be supported on a CEOs salary. There’s a big problem with the logic that if you paid a CEO less, you’d hire more workers. The quantity of work hasn’t changed when you pay a CEO less. You see, I happen to believe that you are supposed to pay people when they do work. Giving a CEO generate no additional work, so why pay someone to do nothing? That’s why I hate unions, at least one of the many reasons, but that’s a different topic.
So, if you cut CEO pay, where should the money go? Personally, I don’t think that’s the most effective way to spread that money toward more civic duties that gold plated crappers (get it, “duties”?). Let the CEOs make $20 million a year. Just don’t let them get off on $3 million in taxes. Get rid of their loop holes, and raise their income tax. And/Or…never pay another bail out again. Make it a constitutional amendment. It would force the companies to re-invest some of the money they throw away on rich people into making the company more liquid and better able to handle the shocks to the economy that they help to create. It’d make them more cautious so as to prevent such shocks from occurring in the first place, and more ready in case it did happen.
So, you want a Magna Carta?
1) Cap tax deductions for individuals at $100,000 a year. That’s a ton. It hurts people who bring in more than $300,000.
2) Increase the income tax rate to, say, 43% on those earning more than $300,000 a year. By the way, my little family makes a friggin ton of money a year, and we should be paying more taxes on it. So, change the rate for the upper middle class too. Whenever the politicians talk about tax cuts for me, I think “geez guys, shouldn’t you be helping someone who actually needs help?”
3) Write an amendment preventing the government bailout of private corporations.
Perhaps it’s a start. Republicans will never do it – most politicians won’t, given how rich you have to be to get in in the first place. Don’t get me started on that – campaign finance reform is one of the most critical things that needs to happen if we’re ever going to set this straight.
One more note: I feel bad for people who have invested time and money in a college education, and yet can’t get a job. I’m sure many of them had more than 12 hours of frat party infested classes a week, and I’m sorry that those people picked a field that makes them unemployable. When the economy turns, they’ll get snapped up. If you spent your teenage years blowing off responsibility and dodging sage advice, and if you never really caught on that hard work is the way to earn your stripes, I’m pretty sure it’d be unfair to give you handouts. You’re like a poor man’s Freddie Mac. All that to say, I think blind, unjustified entitlement is something that impacts the rich and poor indiscriminately. I find it hard to believe that the protesters are made up of any different moral fiber than those they are protesting against. But whatever, it’s at least going to put the Tea Party on its heels, and that’s a good thing.
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