Thank You, Poor People

Time for change? (10.77 / 13)

Are you pissed off? You should be. Not at me, and not entirely at the banks, credit card companies and car dealerships that all contribute to this. Because the lack of regulation and oversight, and the tax codes that create the circumstances described in here were all done by your elected officials. By the people you put in office.

At every stage the system is rigged to reward those with money and punish those without. Children of middle class and wealthy parents get better pre and post natal care. They go to better schools and get better educations. They get better, higher-paying jobs. And you keep buying the myth that this is an upwardly mobile society and rewarding wealth with tax cuts. Except in very few cases, we are a caste society. If you were born poor, you'll die poor, because everything is designed to keep it that way.

I keep hearing that the dispossessed can't do anything because they don't have the money to buy politicians. Well, people, I'm here to tell you that money is only part of the problem and it isn't the biggest part. You are. The poor vote less than the middle class and wealthy. And every time you repeat that BULLSHIT about being powerless because you don't have money, every time you hold your nose and vote in another politican who will pander to you while writing love letters in the form of policy to corporate America, every time you forget that all the money in the world won't put a politician in office, the only way to get into office is through YOUR VOTE, you actively work to keep the status quo. You make sure that I don't get that $3,000 per month pay cut because with your vote you're saying that you want to keep subsidizing my lifestyle. So thank you. Your extra money every month lets me take vacations and keep my sports car and buy that great piece of sculpture in my living room. You willingly open your wallet and let me dip out what I want because "politics is the art of the possible" and "we don't have the money to fight corporate interests". You sold your power for a mess of pottage and I get to reap the rewards. Thanks. Love ya. Mean it.

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by: Upwardly Mobile @ Sun Aug 24, 2008 at 14:25:06 PM CDT

So (3.67 / 3)

what are you saying they should vote for?  Revoking your faux rich lifestyle by increasing property, consumption and capital gains taxes.

aka Europe, wherein we tax our people into oblivion but have a great lifestyle (unless you're a minority) because we don't have to fund a Military because we hide behind the United States Mother's skirts?

You want to Decrease the ability for homeowners to write off the interest on their mortgages?

There goes the middle class.

What the fuck are you saying in this "brilliant" tome?

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by: PHIL. I. STINE @ Sun Aug 24, 2008 at 22:51:57 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

If your only tool is a hammer (8.40 / 5)

every problem looks like a nail. Somehow you've decided that this is all about taxes. It isn't.

Why were the caps on interest rates removed? Why is it allowed to charge 24% and higher interest rates? Why were the caps on bank fees removed? Why do we not have oversight on predatory lending practices? Why is the only credit avenue available to the truly desperate "pay day loan" places that charge an effective rate of 300%+ annual interest? Why are companies allowed to fuck the segment of the population that is least able to do anything about it?

But yeah, some of it is about taxes. What makes my mortgage interest so much more special than someone else's rent? Why can I deduct my mortgage interest when they can't deduct their rent? Why is the minimum medical deduction so high that people who make the least are also never able to deduct their medical costs?  

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by: Upwardly Mobile @ Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 06:44:21 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Welcome to MLW (8.00 / 4)

Upwardly Mobile!  Excellent essay--you have a great grasp of economic realities, and express them very well.  

Insert witty quote here.

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by: puzzled @ Sun Aug 24, 2008 at 18:56:34 PM CDT

There was a lot more (9.00 / 2)

I wanted to put in here. How I get reduced insurance rates because I do have three cars and because police response times are so much faster in my neighborhood. How I get reduced prices on books and get into those red carpet flight clubs at airports because I have the right credit cards. Even how I manage to finagle "triple dipping" on business travel that results in me getting upgrades to 1st class and personal airline travel - all without costing me a cent. I just figured I probably had enough to make my point as it was.

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by: Upwardly Mobile @ Sun Aug 24, 2008 at 22:05:57 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

This is brilliant (7.00 / 2)

Truly well done.  My gross income is just under $25,000 a year, so you're probably talking directly to me.

I wish we had someone who made $2.5 million a year to tell us all the little ways the system is gamed to screw you over and help him.

Then I wish we could get someone who makes $250 million a year to do the same for them.  It's crazy.  I would give my right arm up to the elbow to have your yearly income and yet we both make functionally the same money to the truly big fish in this country.  To Bill Gates, is there a real, functional difference between $25,000 and $250,000?  Probably not.

Common cause, my friend.  To me, you're rich, but...we've got it.

I don't think this country's economic system really starts to work until you hit at least the eight figure income mark.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present...As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

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by: Raybin @ Sun Aug 24, 2008 at 22:28:59 PM CDT

My poor Raybin... (7.00 / 4)

And I mean that literally. (ba dum bum) You're talking like people who make $2.5 mil are rich. No, no, no. John McCain has explained that you need to make $5 mil to be rich. We should feel bad for them, though. He says many who are breathing that rarified air, are really very unhappy. So, count yourself among the fortunate. ;-)

"What fresh hell is this?" -- Dorothy Parker

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by: Curmudgette @ Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 08:23:18 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

uh, "Don't mention it, friend," ... (9.60 / 5)

Well, as a poor person, allow me---

 "Don't mention it, friend."

Though, strictly speaking, as I don't earn enough to owe income taxes and now live abroad, unless your wealthy status goes back well more than a decade, I haven't contributed to it at all.

But I do have a certain sort of poor person's point of view-and I have some comments to make about your arresting commentary.

First, I want to congratulate you just for merely stating these things at all (though I don't know why you chose to do that in this forum as opposed to some other).  You are, in my experience, extraordinarily rare in that you're apparently a person who not only recognizes that he gets a good many unearned advantages which are made possible by the involuntary contributions of many thousands of others far less well off materially than himself but actually points that out in public-drawing attention to what ought to be glaring inequities but which are almost always ignored, left unremarked.

Check this very blog, if you're curious as to the number of times your points have been raised.  I don't have an exact figure but I'd bet I could count them on one hand.  

So, though you're in what many would regard as a privileged tax-bracket, you're very unusual in your ability to see things from the moral angle, the right & wrong of the status quo.  I suspect, then, that seeing things as you do, you likely also are a more than average generous contributor to charitable causes of various sorts.  If so, again, I offer my congratulations for that.

Don't you wonder, as I do, why there aren't more-as in, say, two--people able and willing to do what you've done here?  What, I wish to know, separates you from the 99.999999999999999999999% of the rest of the wealthy-including those who have wealth which dwarfs yours?  How is it that, simply put, none of them ever comment as you have here where others such as this readership can see (i.e. "hear") them?

Are your comments here commonplace banter at cocktail parties, barbecues, poolside picnics and other gatherings where your financial peers gather for social enjoyment?  Is this the consensus view among them?  Are they, as you seem to be, peeved that so many of the people who've so long gotten the short end of the stick-to put it mildly-so stubbornly deaf, dumb and blind to the most basic facts of life concerning politics that they can't even come in out of the rain and see their plain interests in voting against the oligarchy that rules and abuses them?  Do you make the same observations to your peers?  What's the general reaction in that case?

My curiosity doesn't end there-unlike the general tendencies here in this blog.
I'm also interested to know how you came to your place in the income ranks.  There are roughly two ways that account for people's wealth.   One is that they've striven for it, working in one way or another or several, to gain a stake, and, from that, further efforts which include work, investment and some degree of plain good fortune in their decisions along the way.  After a certain point, they've gained enough to make their continued wealth reasonably secure.   The other common route to becoming wealthy is what might be called the "Paris Hilton" way, that is, through inheritance by birth or, for some, by marriage.

Now, only in the second of these two cases can a person be said to have  sought out wealth.  Some insist that all they really ever wanted was a certain success, whether wealth came with it or not.  And some of them are sincere.  A few.  The rest are shameless liars and the truth is that their primary motive, if not their sole motive, was to gain as much wealth as they possibly could or can.   I suppose that such people are far less likely to write a "Thank you, poor people" essay.
So, I wonder, which is it or was it for you?

All those tax advantages that you listed---I suppose we're to understand, aren't we, that you actually claim them on your returns?  If so, is that because you have no other alternative but to take advantage of them?   The poor, on the other hand, those who you're thanking--- now they can truly be said to have no choice in the matter of their subsidizing your privileged standard of living.  Unlike you, they can't file a return which shelters their income as you can.  The most advantageous return available to them is almost certainly the standard deduction route, offering few elective benefits in addition to the basic tax deduction.

If your starting point on the road to thus-far relative financial security was not that of inheritance or fortunate marriage, then weren't you aware from the start that by earning a pile of money, you'd be at the same time placing yourself in an earning class which enjoyed numerous benefits which are rather hard to explain or justify on the strict basis of fairness alone?   That would seem to me to be the case.  Did you only come later to an appreciation of the fact that, as the saying sort of goes, "the rich (often) get richer and the poor stay that way or (often) get poorer"?

What happened after your schooling?  Did you earn a Bachelor's degree and then go on to a post-graduate degree?   Did you, for example, earn an M.B.A., an M.D. or a law degree?  If so, wasn't earning a very comfortable income a significant part of your intentions and motives?

Now, I want to leave that line of enquiry and give you your due in agreeing on a number of the hard home truths you point out in the essay.  It's true, I think, that to a very great degree, poor people very routinely simply shoot themselves in their silly heads from the political and electoral point of view.  Just as you point out, they generally don't vote at all or, hard as it is to understand, when they do vote, an amazing proportion of them make themselves the patsies of the very social-economic-political interests which so callously fleece them.   It would be very odd if a person such as you appear by the essay to be were not fairly well acquainted in detail with just how that happens to come about.

Poor people, who start with many disadvantages, are saddled with many more of them which work-as designed-to help ensure that they remain poor.  They read little or nothing.  They're grossly ignorant of a good understanding of the ways in which they're systematically made victims, and there are really next to no places available to them where they can turn to remedy those factors which weigh against them.  Where, except in their substandard schools, I ask, are poor and disadvantages people supposed to gain the political sophistication which might afford them a fighting chance against the propagandistic idiocy heaped on them seven days a week through such mass media networks as the ones which carry Rush Limbaugh and Fox News?   You already know, of course, the answer to that.  By the time many poor people drop out of school, they have long since become the victim-prisoners of  a whole array of vicious commonly-held nonsense about politics and economics.  Not only does no one offer them any other view, they become impervious through ingrained suspicion to any one who might eventually later try to correct their erroneous assumptions.  In addition to that, they are also rendered effectively hopeless.  Ask many poor and disadvantaged people what they think of the prospects of their reforming the system which they're able to recognize  as "stacked against them" and what do you suppose you'll get in response from the great majority of them?

For that reason, I really think that, after offering you my, "Don't mention it, friend," your appeals have just as good or better chance of bearing useful fruit if you make them to your peers, those who hold and wield political and economic power and have for, uh, centuries.

Why not try enlightened self-interest appeals on them?   Why not try and point out that a society which operates on a selfish "beggar-thy-neighbor" ethic is one which ultimately harms not only the poor-who are the first and immediate victims-but also harms everyone else generally? ---though to a much less and less direct extent.  If you already do that, then what sort of results have you found?  And, if they aren't spectacluar, are the very poor and abused, lacking so much in advantages, supposed to do much better in hearing and profiting from the same appeals?

In a sense, your appeal resembles a little that of a person who scolds those who are being bound, blindfolded, and stood up in front of a firing squad for not doing more to avoid being shot.  I suppose that they could try and run before the volley is fired, but, as you know, that's simply not what usually happens.  More often, they stand, resignedly, waiting to be shot.

How about you, as a person with tremendous advantages they lack, turning your attention to those who, in the simile, are doing the binding, blindfolding, and firing?---since you, unlike the poor, have "access" to some number of them and at times and in occasions in which they might be thought to be most susceptible to seeing and hearing that there are just possibly alternatives to "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies and ethics which stand a good chance of  tremendously improving the living standards of society as a whole and which offer "returns" of both a quantitative and a qualitative kind which benefit everyone to varying extents.

Read - think - speak - doubt; create - explore - give - love.

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by: proximity1 @ Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 11:23:03 AM CDT

Truly Fucking Superb (5.00 / 3)

proximity1 returns to MLW and with one comment hits a grand slam, returns a kickoff 102 yards for a touchdown and streaks naked past Usain Bolt for a new world record in the 100 AND 200 metres -- simultaneously.

Congratulations.

--7.88, --6.56      If I can't rant, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

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by: Maryscott O'Connor @ Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 11:34:04 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

What I can't help but wonder... (4.00 / 2)

Since all these stupid poor people are making your life so much better, do you return the favor?

I mean, we are comfortable too, not as comfortable as you yet, but comfortable enough.

And we actually do material things to help those around us.  Of course, we do it because that is the way we were raised.  You help your neighbor.  End of discussion.

So while you are enjoying your new crowns, do you think of tossing a couple bucks to that charity that does corrective surgeries for kids all over the world who are born with cleft palates?

Do you mentor teenagers or volunteer with the Boy Scouts or teach reading to illiterate poor people, all excellent opportunities to subtly or not so subtly influence them?  All opportunities to widen their horizons, to teach them to think a little, to help them realize there is a whole lot of stuff out there that is worth exploring.

Maybe send your housekeeper down to the local food bank with some groceries, or donate food to the local soup kitchen, because poor kids get pretty damn hungry.

Obama 2012.  Because he didn't piss off enough people the first time around.

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by: Joools @ Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 12:02:10 PM CDT

He does. (9.00 / 1)

--7.88, --6.56      If I can't rant, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

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by: Maryscott O'Connor @ Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 12:17:03 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

The more I think about this (7.80 / 5)

the more examples I can find of economic inequality.

Social Security contributions max out at $102,000.  Thus, someone making $250K has over half of their salary exempt from this tax, increasing their take-home pay by $9176 they wouldn't have if the cap were removed.

And as salaries rise, so do the inequities.  The average CEO's salary is 344 times that of the average worker.  The tax code gives favorable treatment to companies issuing stock options to their executives, exploiting a loophole which costs taxpayers $20 billion a year.

But how many people on the receiving end of all this corporate and governmental largesse see a problem with it?  Warren Buffet leaps to mind, but of the rank and file "upper class," I'd guess very few.

Insert witty quote here.

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by: puzzled @ Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 13:08:35 PM CDT

To both Prox and Joools (9.67 / 3)

My own story is at cross-purposes to the point of this diary. I wrote "Except in very few cases, we are a caste society." I'm one of the very few cases.

No, I didn't seek wealth. I sought a career I would enjoy, doing things I truly enjoy doing. A side-effect of that was winding up being very well compensated for skills that are in high demand and short supply. If my interests had been in something other than what they are, I would very likely be paying rent for a small apartment somewhere. My schooling, such as it was, consists of a GED and a few semesters of college that didn't result in a degree and had nothing to do with my current career anyway. I read voraciously, anything and everything. If there's nothing else I've been known to read the ingredients lists on groceries. I'm able to see both sides because I've lived both sides.

Do I claim the deductions I'm allowed to? Damn betcha. I track every receipt, follow every nickle and squeeze every penny till it squeaks. I won't apologize for that, I really don't think I need to. I'm not responsible for the rigged rules and doing a token "protest" would be a pointless display of cutting off my nose to spite my face. Where would the value be in that? I donate amounts of my choosing to causes I feel are important.

Why here and not a cocktail party? (Really, does anybody actually throw cocktail parties any more?) Because I don't believe that many of the people affected by this are actually aware of how much they're affected and in how many ways. They're my people, I come from them. And the 'have' crowd is not going to vote against their own best interest the way the 'have-nots' have. Before I wrote this, I told MSOC that I would be writing it deliberately to sound offensive, smug and condescending. That's the way most of the 'have' crowd looks at this. If the poor are too stupid to know what's in their best interest, well fuck them.

Prox, I'm torn on your pronouncement that the poor are too (stupid, indoctrinated, unaware) to be able to make effective use of this information. On the one hand, I want to agree. But, see, that's the voice I don't usually listen to, because that's the voice that has given me nothing but slanted, over-generalized and bigoted thinking in the past. I don't trust that voice. Not even when it comes from you instead of my own head. Are the poor actually poor because they're less capable, prox? Or is that just shades of that time you read Ayn Rand peeking through? See, I don't think there's anything stopping them from making use of new information. And if they have to have it handed to them instead of seeking it out themselves, I'm all right with that. I understand being so busy keeping body & soul together that you don't have time to ponder past the next 5 minutes. There's that GED in my past to consider; something certainly prevented me from graduating and it clearly wasn't an inability to spell.

While you're off in your ex-pat nirvana, you might want to re-examine some of your prejudices. I really wouldn't be comfortable painting an entire class of people with the "grossly ignorant" and "unsophisticated" brushes, but that doesn't seem to bother you. It kinda does me, because you're talking about most of my extended family.

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by: Upwardly Mobile @ Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 14:07:28 PM CDT

thank you for your reply ----more evidence of how exceptional you are... (0.00 / 0)

Contrary to what some have supposed, my decision to comment on your piece here doesn't mark any intention of mine to return to regular commenting on this blog---as far as I have any reason to believe, there are still too many taboos in effect here to allow me to think of commenting regularly--or even further than this in your thread, though I'd have plenty to add if that were not the case.  I chose to comment because your remarks are, in my opinion, too rarely seen and too important to have passed up.

  If you're amenable to it, I'd be very happy to discuss this and any other topics where I regularly post---a blog you can find at "thewildwildleft.soapblox.net".

 Despite what my questions might suggest, I'm generally quite sympathetic to your views--in which I can find a lot to admire and agree with.

  Since this may mark the end of our conversation, I want to add that there is no such place as an expat Nirvana.  My country of residence has all the ills which are found in the US with only some differences of degree and form.

  Nor do I believe even for a moment that to be poor is synonymous with being stupid and certainly not synonymous  with being incorrigible.  I presented a generalization which is only generally true--that among the poor, for good reason, are found a whole host of ills, of deficiencies, of failings, which taken together only aggravate their basic plight.  Native intelligence, of course, is something inherent and springs everywhere, regardless of the social or economic conditions into which one may be born or raised.

  The fact remains that the obstacles which poverty presents to social and economic advancement are so formidable that, as you yourself observed, it's the exceptional individual who by dint of his smarts, main stregnths and efforts, overcomes them to win conventional kinds of "success".  It happens but it happens most among those who entirely buy into a view of the world which is the comforting delusion of those who subscribe to a cut-throat's vision of human existence as resembling a pitiless jungle of predation where not the strongest but the most unscrupulous and quick witted prosper most--and who, until they need society's help to bail them out, claim to be content with such a set of circumstances.

  You are rare, yes, but both experience and well-founded theory tell us that your humanitarian insights are entirely subject to being promoted, inculcated in youth,  advanced through the conscious design of society's institutions just as our present anti-humanitarian propensities are fostered, inculcated, given every material support and advantage so that the very predictable result is a society which is steeped in not just an cruel individualism which is both destructive and against human nature as our genes give it to us, but also entirely unjustified on the basis of sound economics and social progress.

 Poor people are not born stupid.  They are often born disadvantaged and that is in ways which by both accident and design, mitigate against their becoming self-confident, self-sufficient and masters of their destinies.  That's a generalization, too, but one which is so reliable that, by the age of two or three, one can point out with a terrible accuracy which children are going to enjoy lives of relative comfort and prosperity and which are going to live in some degree of want and misery--and one can determine that merely from a careful examination of the child's socio-economic starting point.  In any fair, just, humane society, such a thing would not be possible.  

  It remains far too much the case in the society in which I live, too.  Hence, mine is not an expat Nirvana nor a place where the inequities which are so prevalent in the U.S. are entirely unknown.

  If you could, I know you'd remake such conditions from top to bottom and I admire that about you.  It's just one of a number of things we have in common.

Read - think - speak - doubt; create - explore - give - love.

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by: proximity1 @ Tue Aug 26, 2008 at 09:31:12 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

You know, prox... (6.00 / 2)

Trolling for WWL traffic here is pretty fucking tacky.

--7.88, --6.56      If I can't rant, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

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by: Maryscott O'Connor @ Tue Aug 26, 2008 at 17:35:22 PM CDT

[ Parent ]