Pity the Poor Rich

When my son was born we were living below the poverty level. I’m bragging because it was more or less intentional. I grew up lower middle-class (After my father left when I was 13 my mother went back to work as a teacher and raised me with no child support.) Currently my wife and I are middle to upper middle-class. When she wants to buy something that before our changed circumstances would have given me grief which I would pass on to her I now say, “No problem, we’re rich.” which she hates to hear me say.

Am I happier “rich” than poor? Not at all, in fact, I believe the years we lived below the poverty level were the happiest of my life. I believe the reason was that I was doing meaningful things: raising food for my family, cutting, splitting and carrying wood to keep us warm, making do on a shoe-string, fixing things that broke. I had occasional part-time jobs during that period but as a bartender, for example, making a good drink or making a customer laugh or getting a big tip did not provide much satisfaction. Earning enough money to pay for utilities, insurance and the like was necessary but didn’t have the same instant payback in satisfaction over an accomplishment as work around the farm had. Getting through a very busy shift in which I was so busy the time went by in a blur was satisfying, doing a good job perhaps better than most others could have done it, felt good; but so much of the job was, well, just a job, whereas fixing a leaking water pipe, rebuilding the mower carburetor, raising, slaughtering, and butchering the beef that would feed the family for a year, growing, harvesting, canning, pickling, freezing and otherwise storing enough vegetables and fruit to feed the family for a year; ahh, nothing I did before or have done since provided that kind of satisfaction.

The difference now? Someone comes and picks up my riding mower to perform annual maintenance and to fix anything that breaks. There is no pride in that. I tell myself I am providing work for others; my financial good fortune is trickling down and that’s a good thing, isn’t it? It’s good for the economy, right? Plumbing was my least favorite home maintenance job but I did it and though I hated squirming around in the crawl spaces under our house and hated it even more when I turned on the water and found that one of the joints I had soldered had a leak and I would have to drain the water and dry the pipe before I could try again; but when the joints were good I came close to doing cartwheels. Now we call a plumber.

I was healthier when we heated with wood. It was our only source of heat for 20 years. Carrying half a dozen armloads of wood in every day in the winter kept me fit during the time of year when there wasn’t a lot of exercise. We still have the stoves and a woodshed full of wood but we also have an oil burner. I don’t have to carry in wood all winter so I hardly do it at all. Burning oil doesn’t make me feel good but, what the hell, I’m rich. Do you think that is an excuse for lazy?

Perhaps my years below the poverty level helped me avoid ethical problems studies have found with the rich. 

Raise My Taxes, Please!

Dear Senator Snowe,
I just read the "Snowe Report" and I agree that the LIHEAP (Low Income Energy Assistance Program) should be funded at a higher rate than in the budget and that deficit reduction is important though the juxtaposition of these two statements in your report is a bit ironic, don't you think? Every spending program (like LIHEAP) is important to some people somewhere which is why spending cuts are so difficult.
There is one thing that the majority of people all across the country and in Maine agree upon as a deficit reduction measure yet you don't mention it. Why? Why don't you support raising the income tax on those of us who are doing well? The answer I keep hearing is that it will kill jobs, that the wealthy who create jobs will not bother to make more money and thus create more jobs if they are taxed too much. That is a bogus answer. We have had tremendous job losses under the low tax on the wealthy for 8 years running which should prove that argument to be spurious.
Did you know that the highest income tax bracket was over 90% throughout the decade of the 50s and that was a time when a family could be raised on one income. Perhaps the reason middle class people could get by on one income in that decade was because there was little incentive for entrepreneurs, business owners, corporate boards, bankers and the like to make gross amounts of money so they paid better wages and charged less for their products and services. That explanation, at least, makes a lot more sense than saying that taxing incomes over $250,000 will stifle job creation.

Politics

Politics from my sister in New Zealand

“He(Gingrich) knows how to deflect a negative against him back onto the projector as proven by his stern reprimand of John King at the beginning of the CNN debate.”

Yeah, that was classic Republican-right shoot-the-messenger and it seems to work very well for them.

“I am dismayed by voting statistics that say married women have rallied behind Gingrich.” My mother, a staunch Republican, said of Rockefeller, a Democrat, when he was running for president 50 odd years ago that she could never vote for someone who was divorced reasoning that if they couldn’t run a marriage they couldn’t run a country. It didn’t matter several years later when she voted for divorced Republican Ronald Regan.

I watch the Fox news channel occasionally to try to understand where those folks are coming from. The most recent rant seems to be how unfair the “liberal media” was in their attacks on Gingrich when they gave Clinton and Edwards a free pass on their extramarital affairs. Apparently the Murdoch Media (FOX) doesn’t watch Liberal Media because it was on “Liberal Media” that I got more information about Clinton’s blow job and Edwards’s affair than I cared to hear. If the Liberal Media was so over the top attacking Newt, you would think they would have brought up the South Carolina governor’s lying and affair with the woman in South America. If they did, I missed it. I’m betting FOX would have made something of it if the governor and Newt were Democrats.

“Personally I cannot stand Sarah Palin being inserted into the conversation, as if she has any influence.”

Ah, ha, you are watching Fox because the only place I ever see Palin these days is on Fox where she said: “If I had to vote in South Carolina, in order to keep this thing going I’d vote for Newt and I would want this to continue. More debates, more vetting of candidates because we know the mistake made in our country four years ago was having a candidate that was not vetted…” I guess Palin wasn’t paying attention to the Democratic primaries and the debates between Obama and Clinton and the close scrutiny of Obama by the “liberal media” and the Murdoch Media. Of course, she wouldn’t have been paying attention then because that was before she was picked as Republican VP candidate and she was much too involved in her job as Governor of Alaska, a job she loved so much she quite mid-term. (For any who don’t know me, that last sentence is meant to drip with sarcasm.)

Mort Media here says Newt must like quitters as he told CNN “I would ask her to consider taking a major role in the next administration if I’m president…” Like what, Newt, Secretary of State?

“I would sure like to know your opinion about this election process to date.”

Well, Sis Chris, I think we have more problems than any president can fix without making a lot of people unhappy. I think that we, the citizens of the U.S., have come to the place that someone said of our Constitution 200 years ago that when we figured out we could vote for our self-interest our system of government would fail. We don’t seem to have a long view. Rich people seem to think that they can hold onto all the money and somehow the economy will thrive even though the vast majority doesn’t have buying power. Henry Ford paid his workers good wages so they could buy his cars. Smart.

We are afraid to make a transition to a different source of energy even though the current source is killing us, damaging the world we live in, contributing to our national debt and making us vulnerable to foreign powers. We have a political system that is so divisive it is unlikely any leader no matter how extraordinary he or she might be has little chance of making positive change. There is a part of me that thinks one of the Republican candidates as president might not be such a bad thing as they would not fix the problem and could then take the Republican nonsense down in flames two years later and then again two years after that but then a better part of me holds out hope that four more years of Obama might give him a chance to turn things around.

This is a difficult time to be a caring U.S. citizen with a long view.

Wall Street Bonuses

“What to do about those gross Wall Street bonuses?” politicians, “experts” and pundits bewail. They debate how best to regulate such things. Please. The answer is simple. Bring back the 91% income tax bracket.

Those of us who remember the 50s do so with fondness. It wasn’t all “Life with Father”, “Leave it to Beaver” and “Ozzy and Harriet” but it was a time when most mothers concentrated on the most important jobs like raising a family and managing a household. She was able to do that because one income supported the American Dream. Why did employers pay better then? One answer might be that there was little incentive to make gobs of money as the highest tax bracket was 91%. In 1954 income below $75,000 (today’s dollars) was taxed at 20%. Someone earning $1 million (today’s dollars) was in the 62% tax bracket. Anyone earning over $7.5 million paid 91% of every dollar over that amount in taxes.

Consider the fights between millionaire sports stars and millionaire sports team owners over multimillion dollar contracts. They are fighting over figures because in actual money it is too much for any individual to spend reasonably. I would put a cap on individual income. If you make over $2 million a year, you have to either give it away or give it to the IRS. Now the choice is either to make less than $2 million or to give it away which is a good motive, rather than greed, for making money. The sports stars will be easier to negotiate with. The team owners will either be generous to charities or, more likely, they will pay their employees more and charge less for tickets.

The 1954 tax brackets were essentially the same from 1951 through 1963. Want to guess what years the highest tax bracket was lowest? Other than the first three years of income tax in the US the lowest high tax bracket was 24%. Come on, guess the year. It was the year when greed ran amok. That it! 1929! The rate was 25% for the four years leading up to the Great Depression.

One more question in this quiz. When was the second lowest? It was, thanks to President Reagan, 1988-90 and has remained low ushering in the Great Recession.

I’m not talking about wealth redistribution. I’m talking about people making more money than they know what to do with and in the process bringing down a society that would be much better off if families could pursue the American Dream on the income of one wage-earner. I’m really just talking about family values as opposed to greed rules.