Go read ‘Turk and Taibbi and come back.
Because Christ Almighty, let’s make a list of people who make too much money, okay? Two-thirds of Congress and everybody who works for them. Rick Santelli. The fatheads at talk radio everywhere. Bob Costas, Joe Buck, Bryant Gumbel, everybody associated with the Today show, and the literary estate of Norman Mailer. “Fundraising” consultants who sell nonprofits a foolproof system to make money — which IS their foolproof system of making money — like, go rob a liquor store like grownups. Bill FUCKING Maher, America’s college newspaper opinion columnist. The people whose gas grills are bigger than their cars, because it cooks meat, okay, it isn’t a complicated process. Columnists at the New York Times. Especially David Brooks.
All these people make too much money. Teachers and steelworkers? Not so much. I spend 20 minutes around a few demon kids and their batshit parents, I want to rip somebody’s face off, and these people do it all day long AND THEY LIKE IT, the freaks. A four-hour shift at the animal shelter cleaning cages requires me to take a hot bath and lay down with a jug of wine to avoid my body locking up like a bank vault, and some 56-year-old dude is literally making the foundations of the city without complaint for 12 hours a day and all he wants is his pension, goddammit. These people do not make too much money.
Until these people are the ones out there cutting people off on the freeway in their Infiniti SUVs and buying $35,000 marble inlays for the floors of their “libraries” they’re not making too much money, and really, not even then. Fuck it, somebody needs to have a nice house and car around here and it might as well be people who make things and people who do things. I might be jealous, but that doesn’t mean they’re making “too much”
money. We have this system and this is how it works.
I mean, once you start the contest of who makes too much money, as I’ve just illustrated above, it just turns into a list of people you think suck, and if we’re distributing wealth based on who we think sucks, if you don’t mind me I’ll be out back burying my cash in the park because me and mine ain’t guaranteed lifelong popularity. So some bus driver’s making a mint (I would not drive a CTA bus if you paid me a million dollars, you have to be a driver and a cop and a marriage counselor and HELL NO), good for him. He’s owed at least as much as some banker schmoe whose worst day involves his secretary putting too much sugar in his coffee.
Schmucks.
A.
Sorry to threadjack, but have you noticed Doddhas senioritis? It pisses me off so much because he was such a stalwart during the FISA debate. What the fuck is he doing now?
He really was, but on finance he seriously falls down on the job.
A.
wait, the dude’s name is Cowherd?
It’s like the Range Finder game on The Price Is Right. You can argue for whatever you want to be rich at the top of the Range Finder but then the bottom of the range has to be higher than living in squalor. There’s no ‘The price of running my humble household is somewhere between $250,000 and $9,000, Bob.’ That’s no game. If you can hire 5 new cops in Chicago for what you say doesn’t make one guy humping a desk in a bank rich, I say you’re fucked.
dodd is farting his way out. nice.
Of course, even the realistically calculated “average” outcomes in the press are often the mean where the median is a more relaistic figure and also more realistic for applying to social behavior. And the media, which we worship, has “Lifestyles of the Rich and famous” and not “Lifestyles of the destititute box liver”. The folks appearing on “The Price is Right” have to have certain resources to take a vacation, etc.
Colin Coward has been sucking Joel Osteen’s Prosperity Gospel dick for as long as he’s been on the radio.
This is a symptom of one of the truly massive problems we now face – the huge gap in income between the very well off and the barely getting by. Such a gap is bound to result in comparisons between the worthiness of many of the very well off by the barely getting by.
I think there are people who have been blessed with enormous talent, which they have worked extremely hard at honing. Those people deserve every penny they can get someone to pay them. Then there are those who cheat their way into the very well off group. They deserve a penny.
In between those groups is a large group, too large for me to every attempt to rate as to worthiness. I’ll just say that, for sure, I am worth far more than my measly pension says I am.