What do you think when you read that a single hedge fund manager, David Tepper, earned $4 billion last year?
At first, I found it unfathomable. And then disturbing.
The average working American earns $18.90 an hour, or less than $40,000 a year. Some 15 million Americans are currently unemployed. Nearly two billion people around the world subsist on less than $1.50 a day. More than 16,000 children die each day from causes related to hunger.
How does that make David Tepper feel? How about the next two dozen top hedge fund managers, who earned an average of about $1 billion each last year?
The most powerful article I've read in the past ten years is "What Should a Billionaire Give - and What Should You?" It was written by the philosopher Peter Singer, an Australian-born professor at Princeton, and published in the New York Times Magazine in 2006.
Singer begins by making an incredibly simple point: "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it."
Singer first laid out his reasoning thirty-five years ago, in a scholarly article, using a hypothetical case. If you were to pass by a child who was drowning in a shallow pond, he asked, would you make an effort to save the child? For nearly all of us, the answer is plainly yes. We'd do so even if it meant muddying our clothes or being late to our next appointment, since those consequences pale next to the potential death of a child.
If that's so, Singer went on, we should feel no less compelled to save a child from certain death, even if that child lives thousands of miles away and the death is one that occurs over time, from malnutrition.
Today, Americans donate an average of 2 percent of their gross income to charitable causes. But what if the richest people gave much more away (and still kept a lot)?
If Tepper donated $3 billion, for example, he'd still have $1 billion left from last year's earnings. If the top one tenth of one percent of US taxpayers - approximately 150,000 people in all - gave away one-third of their income, they'd generate nearly half of what the UN has estimated it would take to cut in half the number of those living at the most abject level of poverty. And still be left with more than $10 million in income a year for themselves.
It's hard to imagine that any of them would be any less comfortable, or happy, or secure, as a result. How much incremental value, of any kind, does a person get by earning $10 million instead of $5 billion, or $4 billion instead of $1 billion?
Compare that to the value created by giving a significant percentage of that money to those who need it most. Literally millions of lives could be saved. And it even has benefits closer to home, in the message it would send to the rest of us.
Nearly every leader is looking for more engaged, committed, loyal employees. One good way is to set an example that inspires them.
Think about it:
Would you feel differently about working in a company in which the CEO and the most senior executives gave away a third of their earnings to help eliminate poverty? Would you feel better about your job if you knew that as a consequence of whatever work you do, fewer kids would die of malnutrition and more of them would get educated?
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When one man makes the same as over 58,000 teachers (at $50,000 salary and $20,000 in benefits) at the same time that over 300,000 teachers are expected to be laid off...that is just plain old insane.
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-435298
The bottom line is that since about the RAY-GUN years....when someone said that "greed is good," this country changed to being "of the money, by the money, for the money."
What can we do? If the politicians are paid off and the media is run by the corporations (in general) and Supreme Court kow tows to the corporations with a bogus free speech argument in the Citizens United decision, is there any hope?
Yes ... we need to close the hedge fund manager loophole that allows Tepper to pay only 15 percent capital gains on the $ billion instaed of the normal 35-38 percent top income tax. Urge passage of the financial reform bill...it's a start.
Then, us "normal people" need to get things changed is by joining the populist movements...(and not the corporate sponsored tea party movement which is fake radicalism for dummies) ...I mean the real ones...
I think Jim Hightower sums it all up pretty good here....
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04302010/watch2.html
I come from West Virginia, so I can vouch that it is a relatively poor state. The average coal-miner makes roughly $70,000 a year salary base. This is considered a very good wage (factoring out the risk). $70K is very much a livable wage in the mountain state. Now consider the risk involved. The brave miners that lost their lives were receiving wages similar to this, and are constantly facing danger every day. Not to mention the long-term effects of working in a mine (vision impairments, black lung, various breathing issues, etc.). Now, do you think they should get paid more than what they are? Up to the discretion of the reader but I certainly think so.
They certainly are working harder than some fatcat like David Tepper, and facing more risk than him clearly. Probably the biggest risk he faces is getting mobbed by angry citizens.
Someone made 4 billion dollars? Good for them. As long as I can still afford to stay in my apartment, buy fuel and other basics off my wages, I'm generally a happy camper, and if it comes to a situation where I can't do that, then a place where I can set up a tent and a campfire/equivalent upon which to cook my dinner. I wouldn't know what to do with a million dollars as it is, and you couldn't GIVE me a limo.
The Constitution is a man made construct...it IS not the "end all and be all".
YOU said, and I quote " no one's really entitled to anything in life"....so I ask you to dig a little deeper....DID YOU or anyone CHOSE to be here? I mean, was it YOUR choice to be born?
NO, it wasn't, no one made the choice to be born. That choice was made for YOU by another.
As such, IF YOU really think about it, as certain things are necessary to sustain life; those being....food, water, shelter and oxygen.... those things are indigenous to NATURE and if YOU really THINK about it...those things ARE provided by nature for the sustainability of life, BUT man (himself, through social constructs) limits the availability of most basics (other than oxygen...simply because man hasn't figured out a way to limit it's availability).
MAN creates the constructs...not nature, therefore it is simplistic and selfish to assume the basics needed to sustain basic life are limited and it comes down to nothing more than man's inhumanity to their brethren; thus man is a not a morally good creature, if man is so selfish and so self centered as to not allow the basics needed for survival to ALL and considers such to be "entitlements". I suggest, the man who thinks such is a morally reprehensible creature.
Anyone that believes wealthy people create jobs when they get tax cuts/minimal taxes on investment earnings for personal wealth is insane or stupid. My boss spends more on one dinner out with his wife than most people earn in a week. Tax cuts/lower taxes on investments only mean one thing to the wealthy: more personal spending and more money for the kids when they die.
Lower taxes simply mean a greater reward for the same risk. This, due to competition, generally translates to lower prices which means those that use the services/products produced by your boss are the real beneficiaries.
I was merely pointing out that the conservatives are somehow convinced that wealthy people create jobs when they get tax cuts/minimal taxes on investment earnings for personal wealth. This is simply not true. You have no evidence or facts to back up your claim.
$1,000,000,000 per year is upwards of $2,800,000 per day. If anyone can't live - extremely luxuriously - on that amount, that person needs a basic lesson on how to balance a checkbook.
We'll have the accusations of, "Socialism!" but really, so?
I'm not proposing a way to make this happen, but tying a maximum wage to the minimum wage is merely the next step in capitalism. Billionaires can take care of themselves, they don't need poor or middle class people to stand up in the ultra-rich's defense.
By the way, the minimum wage was enacted (in America at least) to keep people from working (and it certainly does that). A maximum wage will just keep people from the getting the products/services they desire. How is that good?
How much is siphoned off by govts. How much by administrators.
How much money goes to buy weapons. How much money goes to people who are sacrificing their children like Uganda.
People like to help but they do not like the idea of being robbed. I cannot imagine making 4 billion/yr. If I did I would retire.
I do not even understand how Joseph Kennedy can justify making over 500k/yr running a non profit. Could he not get by on less to help the children?
There's PLENTY of money.
Charitable tax write-offs should be limited to $500/person. It is absurd to let rich people avoid taxes then set up personal charities into which they deposit money and let it sit and grow, tax free, as long as they pay out 5%/year for charitable purposes. It's just another tax con for the rich. I'd suggest we just tax the rich people, and let our society as a whole decide which charitable causes to support. Look at some of the billionaires in this country who pay next to nothing in taxes, hiding their money in their private charities, then using it to promote their businesses -- like buying their own company's brand of computers and installing them in schools in India, so Indians will grow up with that brand loyalty. It's a tax con.
How long would anyone with the capability of making the money in 50% bracket or above would stay in the US only to be robbed by the govt.
They didn't leave the country because where else were they going to make that four hundred thousand. Twas a lot of money in 1963
They'd spend on a planet for themselves if they could.