what if?

The One Percent

I wonder how many of those protesting at Occupy Wall Street realize that they are in the top 1%.

Yes; it's true!

The recent Occupy Wall Street protests have aimed their message at the income disparity between the 1% richest Americans and the rest of the country. But what happens when you expand that and look at the 1% richest of the entire world? Some really interesting numbers emerge. If there were a global Occupy Wall Street protest, people as well off as Linda Frakes might actually be the target.

In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?

$34,000.

That was the finding World Bank economist Branko Milanovic presented in his 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. Going down the distribution ladder may be just as surprising. To be in the top half of the globe, you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it's $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000.

Perhaps instead of protesting about what others have - they should instead be grateful what they do have - and for the opportunities available to most of us here in the U.S., too....

Thou Shall Not Covet

You do not have to be religious to understand that wanting what your neighbor has is not right.

We should quit thinking about the "wealth gap" and start thinking about wealth. Wealth is good. Everybody knows that about his own wealth. If you got rich it would be a great thing. You'd improve your life. You'd improve your family's life. You'd purchase education, travel, knowledge about the world. You'd invest in wise and worthwhile things. You'd give money to noble causes. You'd help your friends and neighbors. Your life would be better if you got rich. The lives of the people around you would be better if you got rich. Your wealth is good. So why isn't everybody else's wealth good, too?

Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros. They don't usually mean to be but that's their moral problem not ours. Most of the world now admits that free enterprise works. Economic liberty makes people rich. But in our residual collectivism and our infatuation with equality we keep trying to get rid of rich people

Grateful

Am I grateful that I am a woman living in the United States rather than in a variety of nations in the Middle East?  You betcha.

Ali, a 34-year-old Cairo businessman who asked that his real name not be used, is weighing whether or not to circumcise his 12-year-old daughter. Female circumcision, or female genital mutilation (FGM), as it also known, involves removing part or the entire clitoris. In more severe forms of the procedure, the labia minora is removed and the vaginal opening is stitched up. Ali’s wife has told him about her own experience; describing her story to me, he said, “It is her most terrible memory.” He has heard discussions on television of potential harm the procedure can cause, but he feels a responsibility to protect the chastity of his daughter until she is married. Three thousand years of tradition instruct him that circumcision is the best means to this end. And, in the post-Mubarak Egypt, there are fewer and fewer voices offering an alternative view. The decades-long movement to stop FGM has become a casualty of the power struggle in Egypt.

Hungry Guys

Occupy Wall Street protestors against rich guys on Wall Street.  One trader talks back.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime, and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”

The Rich Get Richer?

So we are told, over and over from those at Occupy Wall Street and "progressives."  But - is it true?

No.  At least, not all the time.

Here is a fact that you might not have heard from the Occupy Wall Street crowd: The incomes at the top of the income distribution have fallen substantially over the past few years.

According to the most recent IRS data, between 2007 and 2009, the 99th percentile income (AGI, not inflation-adjusted) fell from $410,096 to $343,927. The 99.9th percentile income fell from $2,155,365 to $1,432,890. During the same period, median income fell from $32,879 to $32,396.

These recent numbers illustrate the broader phenomenon, discussed in this paper, that high-income households have riskier-than-average incomes.

Some do not understand what "risk and reward" means.  It means that by taking greater risk, you can increase your income and wealth substantially.  Yet, it also means that the same risk that can lead to enormous rewards can also lead to great drops in income and wealth.

The OWS crowd doesn't quite grasp that part - despite it being the truth.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Many blame Wall Street for the root causes of the real estate disaster of the last decade.  Surely, Wall Street played a key role.

Yet many appear not to realize that good intentions were at least part of the root of the debacle.  A desire to extend homeownership to many led to a dismantling of prudent lending practices.  And our government - members of both parties - was behind this.

What the insiders think.

Oh, Baby

How psychiatry - and perhaps our government - is aiding the destruction of our independence and humanity.

When I was an intern, Dr. Nadelson brought me with him to visit a patient on a locked psychiatry unit. A man there in his thirties, whom I’ll call Frank, insisted he would need to live on the unit forever. He’d already been there for three months, and it was his eleventh admission. He insisted that he needed the nurses to comfort him and that he would take his life were he ever discharged.

Dr. Nadelson, who had reviewed Frank’s psychiatric history extensively and interviewed him extensively several times, listened intently to every word Frank said. Then he looked him directly in the eyes. “You’re being discharged today,” he said.

“I told you, I’ll kill myself if you make me leave,” Frank protested.

“That may be,” Dr. Nadelson said. “And that would injure me deeply. I would be truly saddened. I mean that, from the bottom of my heart.” He paused, and you could tell in his eyes that he did mean it. “But, ultimately, Frank,” he said, “it has to be your decision. You’re a man, like I am.” He put a hand on Frank’s shoulder. “You can find the strength to live like one. I know you can.”

When we left the room and were walking down the hallway, I asked Dr. Nadelson if he really intended to discharge the patient, despite the man’s threat to take his own life.

“Yes,” he told me. “He’ll leave today, with security taking him to the exit, if need be.”

“But what if he kills himself?” I asked.

Nadelson glanced at me. “What makes you think he isn’t killing himself sitting in that room and avoiding his whole life?”

See, Ted Nadelson was a real psychiatrist. He knew what it was to take a real risk and a real look into darkness, in order to restore a man’s soul. He knew it took courage and commitment and compassion, in equal measure. He wasn’t a doctor content to label and medicate and push disability paperwork through this sorry system.

The President of the United States

Get serious!

Memo to the Republican field: You’re running for president. Of the United States. Of America. Start acting like it.

Stop proposing nonsense tax plans that won’t work. Stop making ridiculous attention-getting ads that might be minimally acceptable if you were running for county supervisor in Oklahoma. Stop saying you’re going to build a US-Mexico border fence you know perfectly well you’re not going to build.

Give the GOP electorate and the American people some credit. This country is in terrible shape. They know it. You know it. They want solutions. You’re providing comedy.

This is a serious time. It requires serious leaders.

"A Special Relationship"

If this story about cronyism between government and the unions doesn't fry you - nothing will.

It’s practically a fantasy come to life: work a single day and get a golden parachute that will guarantee one’s retirement in comfort and luxury. Only in Illinois, it’s not just a fantasy, it’s a dream come true for two high-ranking union officials who worked a single day in a public school. Thanks to a loophole in the law that the state legislature inserted into a “reform” law, that one day as substitute teachers will cost Illinois taxpayers a few million dollars in pensions.

Illinois taxpayers recently got hit with big tax increases, thanks to Governor Pat Quinn and a Democratic legislature, thanks to the state’s inability to control its costs. Just think where these millions of dollars could have been spent other than to line the pockets of union lobbyists. Why, the money may have gone to teachers who spent more than a single day in the classroom. Remember this when unions — and Democrats — posture themselves as the saviors of the middle class.

The Wrong Address

Someone should let those "occupying Wall Street" know that they are protesting in the wrong spot.

What caused the crisis, the indebtedness, the unemployment, the stagnation? The culprits are state agencies and enterprises, including our Federal Reserve (our government’s bank), Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), which jointly flooded the country with cheap credit and encouraged and subsidized unsound banking and subprime mortgages, all to encourage wider home ownership, paper prosperity, and cozy relationships with their cronies. We got a housing bubble, mountains of unpayable debt, and a financial crisis. Thanks, Uncle Sam.

The Occupiers have the wrong address. The subprime crisis was designed in Washington, not New York.

Telling It Like It Is

A big Obama supporter explains his views on government and industry.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, gave a remarkable interview this month to the Washington Post.

"So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that's free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don't know how to say it any clearer," Mr. Schmidt told the Post. "It's not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I'm saying?"

"Regulation prohibits real innovation, because the regulation essentially defines a path to follow," Mr. Schmidt said. This "by definition has a bias to the current outcome, because it's a path for the current outcome."

He contrasted innovation in Silicon Valley with innovation in Washington. "Now there are startups in Washington," he said, "founded by people who were policy makers. . . . They're very clever people, and they've figured out a way in regulation to discriminate, to find a new satellite spectrum or a new frequency or whatever. They immediately hired a whole bunch of lobbyists. They raised some money to do that. And they're trying to innovate through regulation. So that's what passes for innovation in Washington."

The Speech that Never Was

Eric Cantor was to give this speech the other day at Wharton.  Depending upon your viewpoint, either Cantor "wimped out" and decided against giving his speech - or decided that an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street that was going to protest his speech would be both too threatening and too disruptive for the evening to work.  So - Cantor did indeed fail to deliver.

Frankly, irrespective of your political views, I do think that is a shame.  It's one of the best speechs that I have read in a long time. See if you don't think so, too.

Depends Upon Whose Ox is Being Gored

Liberal logic on campaign funding.

 

Sky High

I'm guessing I'm somewhere over Tennesse, winging my way home after a week with Mom and Dad. 

Some surgery (successful) for Dad on Monday, then visiting, business, organization and a few dinners out after that.

Tough to leave them.  They are getting "up there" (without the airplane) ....

Still.  Looking pretty good for 90 and 86!

 

The Best of Everything

Boycott Time Magazine

I'm all for various points of view being expressed, including hard hitting and tough.

As far as I'm concerned, however, this goes beyond the pale.

This presidential election has not lacked for clowns, and in a circus Herman Cain fits right in. But as the Black clown, Cain’s foot-in-mouth moments mostly involve insulting the Black community. This could be to establish his independence from the community in order to earn his bona fides with the GOP electorate or a way of appeasing the white conservatives he’s courting. Or it could be that his foot and his mouth are magnetized. Whatever the reason, as a Black person, the Hermanator experience has been as distasteful as rancid, spoiled, stinky, curdled milk.

Cain is a clown. You see it in the way he constantly mollifies white audiences with self-effacing, racialized comedy that borders on minstrelsy (referring to himself as “black-walnut ice cream” or suggesting that the Secret Service call him “Cornbread”). You see it in his stunning gaps in knowledge and understanding of foreign policy and domestic affairs. He says if you don’t have a job, don’t blame Wall Street, because it’s your fault, which in a crippling recession with historically high unemployment numbers means he’s either frighteningly blind or offensively ignorant. This is not a man of serious intellect or realistic solutions or admirable character. This is a buffoon.

If something with similar insults had been written about Barack Obama when he was campaigning, it would have been a cold day in Hell before a magazine like Time would publish it.  And - rightly so.

Publish a column that criticizes the man, his beliefs and his actions, if you wish.  But something like this is not deserving of a spot in any contemporary publication that deems itself to be respectable journalism.

Clearly, therefore, Time has exited responsibility and all that comes with it.

Oh, Baby!

The thirty year old "baby" who wears diapers, drinks from a bottle - yet is not in any traditional sense "disabled" gets to stay in the playpen and collect social security disability.

Question:  what happens if more and more of us decide we want to stay in the playpen ad infinitum and never work? 

Question #2:  are those in the 1% going to pay for the other 99%?

Just curious.

Dear Candidates

I agree wholeheartedly with this.

Tuesday night in Las Vegas it almost reached the level of opera bouffe with one candidate vitriolically accusing another of, albeit unconsciously, using an illegal alien in his gardening service (something so common here in Southern California that, were laws enforced, three quarters of the population would be in jail). Nevertheless, instead of waving off this petty accusation or, better yet, turning it into a joke, the second candidate came back even harder. For a moment it almost seemed the two would come to blows – over nothing.

Everybody’s got an ego, everybody wants to win, but if you have to achieve that by cutting down the other guy, maybe you don’t deserve to lead, not these days anyway. Things are too extreme, the stakes too high. We need someone who can rise above it. Maybe even smile.

The two candidates who appear to have gained the most in the polls since the beginning of the debates are Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich and they seem to be the two who spend the least time on the attack, the most on laying out proposals.

Meanwhile, speaking as an ex-Democrat, you all have a real opponent. His name is Barack Obama and at that Vegas event he was barely mentioned. To most Republican voters these days his political demise is way more important than the identity of his successor. The war cry is ABO – Anybody But Obama – and it should be.

The Last Fight

 

Over thirty years ago, I met a bridge friend from Ohio.  Her vocabulary often sounded like a sailor.  Not only was she not a fashion plate - often half of her dinner plate resided on her shirt.  Nevertheless, she always had a smile on her face, loved people - and was an incredible bridge champion. 

She also became a dear friend of mine.

I'm not quite sure how many years ago now, but quite a few ago, Laurie Kranyak was diagnosed with cancer.  I am quite certain almost any other human being would have gone literally years ago.  But - not Laurie.  She had too many events to try to win, too many dinners to enjoy with friends, too many stories to share. 

Laurie kept on showing up at tournaments.... First it was with medications to control the pain, then morphine - then scooters and wheel chairs.  Nothing, however, could keep her down.  She won national titles and a second place in the toughest bridge pair event ever invented - the latter when cancer had been found just about everywhere in her body.

Finally, today, Laurie's fight stopped.  Her son, also a bridge buddy of mine, announced the news on Facebook.  Scores of people have left messages at how sad they are to see our friend finally have to call it quits - even though all of us don't know how she made it this long.

Almost three years ago, while Laurie and I were playing together, I wrote this for our bridge league's website.  She really was something else.

Laurie - wherever you are - we all miss you.

Special Favors

Irrespective of your political leanings nor your opinions on "green" companies - this story ought to give you pause.