Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Income Disparity

As we all get really pissed at Wall Street and the rich bastards who gambled with our money to the tune of getting our tax dollars as bonuses, it has become clear that the class war rages on.

As Kris Kristofferson once said, "Cuz everybody's got to have somebody to look down on. Who they can feel better than at any time they please."



It's part of the American Dream®. Multiple surveys have shown that people would rather make $80,000 a year and be richer than their neighbors than to make $100,000 per year and be the poorest man on the block. So of course we are all going to yell and scream when someone gets more money than we do yet we will continue to refuse to tear down the system that allows such huge disparities in (futile) hope that we may some day be on the winning end of things.

I've brought this up before and I'm going to hound on it again. Let's at least reduce the gap.

I propose doing away with the minimum wage. That's right. All you hard core Republicans can cheer. I want to see the minimum wage abandoned.

In its place let's institute a maximum wage of no more than ten times (x10) what the lowest paid worker gets. Can we really make the case that any one person deserves to earn the same amount of money in one hour that it would take ten people at the bottom of the scale to earn in that same hour? Does the fact that some woman inherited a multi-national business make her 400,000 times the human that the guy who manages one of her stores is? How much more is she worth than the mother stocking the shelves or the old man greeting the people who have helped her make that fortune?

For the folks at the bottom, they will grudingly concede that a person might be worth, maybe, ten times what they are. After all, doctors have to do a lot of things that they never could. And if there was a cap of 1000%, it wouldn't be long before those folks at the bottom were getting paid enough to make ten times more seem less dreadful.

And it's a damn site better than what most people would like to see them get right now.

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