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Originally Posted by story
In this fantastic story, we learn that people in the 1% bracket are, surprise, blowing their money frivolously and now have the gall to complain about being remotely frugal.
man this whole article is full of rich people whining about how they're just scraping by.Quote:
Originally Posted by dickbags
why don't they hire someone to tell them how to save money?
(sarcasm)
Yea, people at the top of their fields are assholes for expecting to be compensated accordingly.
Would you rather see the dog walker out n his ass? Or the parking attendant?
It's okay to be disappointed with your income. It's not okay to whine that you're "just getting by" on more than $250,000.
I want to earn a lot of money for the work I do, but I don't want to whine about it. I'm not sure what that article was trying to do. I feel a little sympathetic, somewhat angry and disturbed, and mostly confused.
So it turns out the 1% and the 99% aren't so different after all.
Neither group knows how to manage money and both groups are filled with self entitled jack asses.
Oh God, this is so perfect.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hippocrass
Goddamnit Bud Fox
I don't know if this is serious or not, but if you really think that making $250K and complaining about it is alright because this guy is the best at what he does, then why do you look down on the McDonald's worker who's the best at what he does, who makes whatever everyone else in his field make?Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
I mean seriously, I don't care if I have the number one banker in America talking to me, if he says "Oh Venge, I can't stand only being able to spend $276,903 a year! This is the worst, he's a douchebag. If you can't make $100k a year work out for you, then you're stupid, and shouldn't make that much money in the first place.
Sorry, VS, implicit in that statement is that you also have to be the top of a valuable field in which labor is highly specialized. There are literally 300 million replacements for a McDonald's worker, there are likely few, if any, replacements for a tenured professor at one of the top law schools in the country.
And this idiotic small-minded argument of "I would be perfectly fine if I made X, so I don't know why you can't be" is just such complete nonsense (not quite as bad as everyone bitching that Romney "only" gave 3 million to charity, but close.) There are a wealth of lower- and lower-middle class lotto winners, athletes, and actors who so clearly illustrate human nature for us; every one of them, in addition to bankers, hedge funders, private equity types, and CEOs, is paid an exorbitant amount of money. And every one of them finds a way to justify it to themselves. The idea that you would suddenly come from your personal circumstances, have your earnings boosted multiplefold, and be otherwise unaffected is unfathomably stupid.
The issue here SHOULD be when people are paid exorbitantly, in a fashion that incentivizes moral hazard, without assuming the marginal risk associated with their behavior. No one would complain if I owned 100% of my company, debt-free, and decided to bet the whole thing on a roulette wheel, because it's mine. People are--rightfully--upset that executives, most recently at investment banks, are incentivized to make those roulette spins with other people's shares of their firms. Executive compensation being high isn't the problem; executive compensation being high in the face of abject failure is the problem.
Oh, I'm not complaining about how much they make, I'm a little cheesed that they're bitching about not having enough when they earn roughly 5 times my annual income in a year and apparently cannot make a living off of it.
It's more about re-evaluating one's priorities and counting blessings I guess
edit: also, what hippocrass said
Are people surprised that they can't manage money? Poor people and rich people are the same. Oh that single mother making 15k can sure manage it right? No, 15k plus child support plus BET card plus chips... Don't have money for diapers but have it for beer and partying.
That's just a narrowsighted view of it. Some law professor didn't have any part in causing the crisis, so regardless of his income level, he is just as "fault-free" as a middle class family that's feeling tight, or a lower class family that's feeling tight. His job security and income are products of his skill and reputation within his field; you can't begrudge him that. Just like many middle-income families, he was living within his means, and now feels a crunch as his means are reduced unexpectedly.Quote:
Originally Posted by coqauvin
It's easy to say, "Well, make sacrifices: move to a small house in a less expensive neighborhood; get a cheaper car; clean your house yourself; make your wife go back to work." It doesn't make those activities any less difficult to undertake, and some are just financially stupid. The luxuries he describes are the perks of working the way he does; sure, they might not be as modest as "woohoo, we just got a Keurig at the office!" but that doesn't make it easier to give them up. Change is difficult for everyone, especially when you believe, as most everyone does, that you have earned your station and the lifestyle associated with it.
I mean, I'm not saying it was smart to go on the record with a reporter about his specific lifestyle changes (and less so for the banker types, who all have a perceived responsibility for the crisis), because I wouldn't expect Joe Public to look objectively and relate. But as individuals, there's more in common than you expect; the difficulty, stress, and shame of admitting you need to cut back are difficult regardless of the social sphere in which you find yourself.
I agree with all of this (it can be summed up as people with higher incomes have higher overheads and that's not particularly unfair) but, come on, his actual complaints are pretty pathetic. $17,000 a year on his two dogs? At least one of the dogs was a rescue, though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
Yeah the dog walking does sound unnecessary, but it's not impossible that the time it takes to take care of them is more valuable to him than the cost of paying someone else for it. It could be another situation where you can't reasonably get rid of two members of your family.
I mean, it's probably an easy place to cutback, but who knows how it was stated to the reporter in context. I would imagine he probably gave a list of his major expenses (including his dogs' treatment) and the reporter highlighted the most egregious expenses as though he said "I just can't live without this luxury." It's not like these columns (they've become a bit of a trend) were written to be favorable.
Yeah, a snarky blogger's reductio ad absurdum sure is relevant. *eye roll*
The point about "We're not dwarves trying to cut you down to our size, we're asking you to get something off the top shelf because we can't reach it" is probably the only decent point he makes. I just don't see what his problem is with asking, "Why do you need it?"
Damn gas prices, how am I going to afford to fill my Lamborghini with premium gas at $4.30/gal
Article by David WongQuote:
Originally Posted by Vengeful Scars
Even when he is right... he's Wong!
:chiyo:
Zing!
Or maybe he could just cancel his membership to the trump golf course or w/eQuote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
So what makes them so special compared to hundreds of thousands of others who've all been degraded financially, either immediately or through creeping normalcy? Comparing your fictional law professor with my fictional airplane mechanic, which one do you think earns their compensation more? Hypothetically speaking, if you were forced to cut a salary by 25% in order to stay afloat, would you choose the airplane mechanic or the law professor?Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
I mean, we can argue about training and education, and I'm not saying it isn't significantly more difficult to get to be a law professor who makes 250K/a than it is to be an airplane mechanic who makes 80K/a. The problems are the ones that come afterwards - when unions are busted and minimum wage labourers are called in to replaced skilled labourers to keep profit margins at a specific level. Now we have untrained people where skilled people are needed and, quite literally, lives are up in the air. This has already happened in many skilled trade fields, it's happened in manufacturing, where, since the 80's in Ontario at least, the average wage for being a random temp is around $10/hr. This hasn't really changed much in spite of rising costs of living and inflation. Did they deserve that rate of pay? doubtful. Did hundreds of thousands of people have to suck it up, sell their homes and move somewhere more affordable because they were living on inflated wages? Yep. They lived. And so can these highly trained professionals.
I never said there wasn't any shame, stress or difficulty. It's not easy having to downgrade. Anecdotally, the town I grew up in is like a mini detroit - when the car manufacturing industry flopped around, I know many, many friend's families who had to move from relatively modest homes (with a fewoverpriced paycheque-to-paycheque mini mansions) to something smaller so they could keep putting food on the table. I've seen this kind of thing in a community before. It's not even, necessarily, about being perceived as part of the problem (although that makes it sweeter to rub in). It's about realizing that everyone in this system has a role to play, and sometimes even the guys on top have to make sacrifices that aren't scapegoats. Deal with it. Many people have already, they aren't special. They sound like angsty teenagers (Oh my God! No one has EVER felt the way I do right now!) instead of specialized professionals.Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
Coq, you can't seriously believe that... We are inundated by poor people complaining about the economy every day. This is notable because only a few jackasses have been dumb enough to take to the media, and the media has been happy to run their quotes and then rip them apart.
Of course. A lot of the problem is this imbalance of knowledge. It's like when I take my car to a mechanic - I have no fucking clue if he fixed it, if extra work was necessary, if he's charging me a fair price or even how long it will run after he's done. A car is a complicated machine and I have no idea how it works, but he does. If he bullshits me, I can't call him on it without learning the same shit myself (which I have neither the time or inclination to do). Same deal with banking: poor people complain about symptoms and espouse the metaphorical equivalent of folk remedies while those who understand what's going on can straight up bullshit their way out of it. Others who know in the same field may catch them, but the distinguishing features between the arguments are so specific and arcane to an average person that it's more a matter of faith who they actually believe.
Also, the ultra-rich industries have been, unsurprisingly, the least-affected by the recent recession. Fancy beach resorts in Indonesia (built on tidal-waved homes of locals) were hardly affected, as were pretty much any specialty hobby that cater specifically to the extraordinarily wealthy. Their response to thousands of poor people losing jobs and complaining legitimately about shitty living conditions has been largely apathy, seasoned with mild scorn. Forgive my lower-middle class self-righteous indulgence in thumbing my nose at those at the tail-end of the superrich who fell off the wagon and complain about earning over 5 times what I do. Justifying this by defending the jobs of dogwalkers is fucking inane and pointing out specialization of education combined with whatever circumstances (familial or luck-based) that led to their business success in life means nothing if they're doing a shitty job. In a free-market perspective, if they're doing a shitty job, market forces will collapse their industry (look at people who used to run computer mainframes back in the '90s who didn't adapt to a changing work environment) and they can change with it or they're fucked. I give the same amount of pity given in the first place.
on a side note: I'm pretty tired writing this stuff and I'm not entirely certain what I'm arguing about
this is the concept of arguing on the internet
Quotes added, makes more sense this way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
Don't doctors and other critical professions receive relatively lower outside the US?
only until obama care takes effect