Hear that sound? That annoying, incessant whine? All over America it's the sound of the rich whining how high their taxes will go up if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire. Thanks to CBS Sunday Morning, we now have the perfect poster boy for these cry babies: Ben Stein. He used his commentary section on the show to complain about how unfair it all is.
What did I do wrong? I know I have often lost my temper with my wife and the cats, but that's not a crime, yet. I tried to be successful, which is what I thought I was supposed to do. When did it turn out that was a crime to be punished? Maybe when the economy recovers, raising my taxes makes sense, but for now, it's just punishment, and I can't figure out what for.
The rich ARE different from the rest of us: they have no shame. Digby, Michael O'Hare, Brad DeLong, and Kevin Drum have more on The Whining over the jump.
Ben Stein makes the perfect poster boy for all of those rich cry babies out there. (Here's the link to the video. Warning - you may want to put your fist through your monitor after watching it. Watch the pretty nature scenes that follow it to calm down.)
Take this little gem from the transcript:
But what I don't get is this: There is no known economic theory under which raising my taxes in the midst of a severe recession will help the economy recover. It isn't part of any well known monetarist or Keynesian theory. So if it does no good to raise our taxes, I assume we are being punished.
Where do I even begin to unpack this? If Stein is a Keynesian who is all in favor of government spending to get the economy rolling again, it's news to me. Maybe he forgets what he and his fellow conservatives have been screaming about lately: government spending is out of control and the deficit is going to kill us all!
That's what they keep telling us is the real problem. Hey Ben - if you believe the economy is tanking because the deficit is scaring everybody, doesn't it make sense to let the richest people among us give up what was supposed to be temporary in the first place to help fill it in? Won't they just get richer once the economy takes off again, freed of deficit worries? Or is that one of those "known economic theories" you claim to have never heard about? Like the one that claimed if we just cut taxes enough, the government would have more money than ever?
Hat tip to Digby for pointing to a very much in the same vein whine from another beleaguered 'not all that rich' type whining about the massive tax increases he's about to get socked with, and Michael O'Hare's reaction. (And Digby isn't any more impressed with Stein than I am.)
Michael O'Hare ran across a diatribe by:
a law professor, not some high-school dropout Limbaugh lemming, and because the tone of entitlement and whining is typical of a fair number of the comments I got onmy post about intergenerational equity (and by extension, equity).
This guy is all in a dither because he expects the end of the tax cut will have huge effects on his family income.
O'Hare runs some numbers, and .... WTF?
So how does our third-of-a-million-a-year law prof/doctor couple and their three kids, barely scraping by already and falling before our eyes to the very bottom of the top 1% of US families by income, make out under Obama’s rapacious soak-the-rich commie attack on all that is holy and American and fine? Wait for it; take a guess before the jump:
His taxes will go down $3700; he can buy one of those ties every two weeks! And this guy is threatening to fire the gardener and the house cleaner, take the kid out of art class, turn off his cell phones, and try to raise competent adults with only basic cable. Prof. Henderson, I’m ashamed to share my profession with you.
Brad Delong takes the story up a notch with some more figuring.
Now it is time for a reality check on this "most working Americans." The median household income in the United States today is $50,000. Half of all households make more than this. Half of all households make less. The big expenses in the Henderson family budget--their $60,000 a year in contributions to tax-favored retirement savings vehicles, their $25,000 a year savings building home equity, their $55,000 for housing, their $60,000 in private school costs, even their $10,000 a year for new cars--are simply out of reach for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Half of all households make less than $50,000 a year--the Hendersons make nine times that. 90% of households make less than $100,000 a year--the Henderson's make 4.5 times that. The Henderson's are solidly in the top 1% of American households, in the select 1% group that receives more than $350,000 a year.
DeLong does a nice summary of why this guy is so upset. I'd summarize it by these two points: 1) Nobody looks at the the people below them and thinks "Wow! I'm doing so much better than them, I should be happy. 2) No one with wealth is really happy so long as they can look at someone above them who is doing better than they are.
But he wonders rarely. He doesn't say: "Wow! My real income is more than twice the income of somebody in this slot a generation ago! Wow! A generation ago the income of my slot was only twice that of somebody at the bottom of the 10% wealthy, and now it is 3 1/2 times as much!" For he doesn't look down at the 99% of American households who have less income than he does. And he looks up. And when he looks up today he sees as wide a gap yawning above him as the gap between Dives and Lazarus. Mr. Henderson doesn't look down.
Instead, Mr. Henderson looks up. Of the 100 people richer than he is, fully ten have more than four times his income. And he knows of one person with 20 times his income. He knows who the really rich are, and they have ten times his income: They have not $450,000 a year. They have $4.5 million a year. And, to him, they are in a different world.
And so he is sad. He and his wife deserve to be successful. And he knows people who are successful. But he is not one of them--widening income inequality over the past generation has excluded him from the rich who truly have money.
Kevin Drum has a relevant contribution with A Simple Look at Income Inequality.
But regardless of the answers to all these questions, there's still the raw fact that the flow of money in America has changed dramatically over the past few decades. That's why one of my favorite charts is the one on the right. It's updated from the older version that I posted a couple of days ago, and the data comes from an annual CBO report that shows the share of total earnings going to various income levels.
Take a look at the chart at the link. It's not pretty. As Drum summarizes:
If you look at the raw CBO figures, they show that a full tenth of the national income has shifted since 1979 to the top 1% of the country. The bottom quintiles have each given up a bit more than two percentage points each, and that adds up to 10% of all earnings. That 10% has flowed almost entirely to very tippy top of the income ladder.
Is the middle class worse off because of this? Of course they are. Income matters even if plasma TVs are cheaper than they used to be or if CPI mismeasures middle class consumption or if average households now contain 2.6 members instead of 2.7. If this massive income shift hadn't happened, middle class earnings would be higher, they'd be able to buy more stuff, and they probably wouldn't be in debt as much. And the top 1% wouldn't have quite so much idle cash lying around to do stupid things with.
I'll close this by going back to Stein; he's the epitome of the clueless, graceless ruling class running this country into the ground, those with no understanding or empathy for anything except their own immediate selves.
I own some real estate in California and Idaho and the District of Columbia. Naturally, I pay property tax, supposedly mostly to educate local children. Not far from me, the city of Los Angeles just spent about $600 million to build the most lavish school in America for about 4,000 children. That's my money. Naturally, I had no say in it. My wife and I have no children in public schools and only did for about eighteen months long ago. I still pay my school tax ever year.
I am not asking for any tears. I live a great life, have a fabulous wife, a great son and daughter-in-law, four wonderful, furry dogs and six cats, all adopted. I have more than enough to eat.
emphasis added
We're supposed to feel sorry for Stein because he has to pay property taxes to educate children not his own, people he doesn't even know. Did he really put up $600 million of his own money single-handedly to pay for the school? Without protest? And he still had enough money to send his kids to private schools apparently? But he's not asking for tears - he has enough to eat. Wherever and whenever he wants. And he likes pooties and woozles. Such a wonderful human being. A real prince.
Right. This is a guy with enough money to own property in several states - and he whines how he has no say in being taxed to educate strangers. Like he doesn't use platforms like Sunday Morning to spread his views. Like he doesn't vote. Like he has no idea why he should live in a country where everyone should be entitled to a good education, or why that might be a good thing for him. I'll let Digby have the last word on Stein and why he's being 'punished'.
As far as I'm concerned, his "sin" is being a spoiled, talentless, arrogant cartoon celebrity who adds no value to anything in this misbegotten society and yet thinks he's some kind of Galtian hero. If I have to listen to one more of these petulant scumbags argue about how they're being punished for their "hard work" I'm going to stab my ears with chopsticks. It's class warfare all right --- launched by crude, wealthy American slobs who have no class.
UPDATE: Paul Krugman has picked up on this too: here, and here.
On the Chicago lawyer suffering because he's not rich enough, Krugman compliments Brad DeLong for his analysis of the peculiar agony suffered by the less than ultra rich:
Brad isn’t the first to make this point, but his discussion of how rising inequality at the top — a fatter right tail in the income distribution — makes the objectively rich feel poor is exceptionally fine:
On Ben Stein's assertion that most of the estate he inherited from his parents was eaten by taxes, Krugman makes a telling point:
OK, the late, great — and I mean that — Herbert Stein died in 1999. At that time the first $650,000 of an estate was tax-free — $1.3 million for a couple, provided it did what CBO calls “minimally competent estate planning” — with a 55% tax on the amount above that.
So either Ben Stein inherited several million dollars — which, although this may be news to him, is not the experience of most Americans — or he’s just making stuff up.
Welcome to the Great American Tragedy of 2010 - the suffering of the rich. Excuse me if I do not feel their pain.
UPDATE AGAIN: Woot! Rescued. Consider my timbers shivered!