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New York, 2:16 PM
Thu Nov 26
41 posts in the last 24 hours
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04/16/09
04/16/09
Get a headstart and feed your targets chestnuts.
04/16/09
How about THIS:
People who make up to 30K NET don't pay ANY taxes?
How about THAT?
..
04/16/09
04/16/09
We are self-employed and our health insurance runs $1800 per month for our just our family of five. That is about half of what the average joe makes in our country.
04/16/09
04/16/09
Everybody should declare that he can live on a subsistence $10k a year, allocate himself 20 square feet of space to sleep in, and ship the rest of his money promptly to the poors.
Of course, this should only be a stopgap measure until we have lobbied the government to charge a 100 percent tax rate on all income about $10k annually. Perhaps the cap should be even lower.
That's right, ALL OF IT!!! It shouldn't belong to you.
What's that? You have an iPhone? Cable TV? A used Toyota? You bought a pair of sneakers even though your other ones were barely worn out? Your apartment has more than 200 square feet?
What incomprehensibly insensitive cretins, wallowing in luxury that would be unfathomable to at least a billion people on the planet. Half the world would be so lucky to even contemplate such things.
04/16/09
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04/16/09
I bet having to clean the cat hair off the couches themselves will make them shut the hell up.
04/16/09
Cha-ching. Reality show. "Trading Places"
I want a producers credit biatches.
04/16/09
NOW where's that producers credit?
04/16/09
Ooo I wonder if we get MTV. That sounds like fun.
04/16/09
04/16/09
No point to make here really, just wanted to say that we do realize how lucky we are - you'll not hear us whine.
04/16/09
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Can we do the math again before we start foaming at the mouth and get all class-warry? It's about 0.4%
I think 250k in, say, New York city is good enough to be classified as 'comfortable' but certainly not 'rich'.
04/16/09
04/16/09
Median should be shot. Government stats creatures love it.
04/16/09
04/16/09
ur doin' it rite
04/16/09
04/16/09
c'mon. We're too angry to miss subtle snark? Yeah, I guess we are.
04/16/09
Nice trollery!
04/16/09
04/16/09
Or how bout we just create a reasonable floor and ceiling for everyone?
04/16/09
Chumas, I don't know where in Florida you live, but according to www.swz.salary.com, if you are in Pensacola, FL, and you earn $17,000, you'd have to earn $32,575 in NYC to "maintain your current standard of living." That's because "the cost of living in New York, NY is 91.6% higher than in Pensacola, FL." So I guess $40,000 is really relative! $40K is pretty good livin' in FL, but closer to your situation if you're living in NYC.
And for added color commentary, I have friends who earn in the $50K region in NYC, and it's really hand-to-mouth living for them (though they're by no means destitute. They just have shitty shoebox apartments, can't eat out much, and don't save all that much).
Now, let's take that $250K figure. If you earn that amount in NYC, you could maintain your current lifestyle with $130,464 in Pensacola. I think by that measure, $130K+ still puts you in the well-to-do category, so yeah, those $400K folks don't have much to complain about...
Now, whether people in the $250K/$130K range should pay the same amount of taxes as the super-rich (think millions, yachts...) is another question. There was an interesting article in the WSJ about creating a different tax bracket for the "merely rich" and the obscenely rich (sorry, can't find the url). Makes sense to me, especially if you consider that many of the $250K crowd are joint filers (so divide income by two) and are well-off, but by no means in the yacht-and-champagne-showers category (which the $400K salary approaches). You would stop the "merely rich" from bitching so much, and the super-rich would have to cough up more. Win-win!
04/16/09
04/16/09
Better to be in a shoebox apartment in NYC doing work you love, than in some dull shithole that calls itself a city yet doesn't even provide a toehold in your desired industry.
People in NYC complain about the cost of living--but weighed against the psychic cost of living anywhere else, we KNOW what we have is WAY better.
04/16/09
In 2007, the median household income in New York City was $48,631. [www.observer.com]That's median, as in half made more and half made less, and household, as in the total for all income earners in a given home. So your friends--assuming they are pulling in individual 50k salaries--are better off than most. There's a difference between people who live hand-to-mouth because they have to, and people who choose to spend their money in such a way that they often don't have very much of it.
04/16/09
04/16/09
Take it from a guy who went Fordham and ended up selling gold on Fox. (Uncle Wiki)
04/16/09
Also, it's easy to say "go to a state school" if you live in CA or VA or TX or any other big state with excellent public-school opportunities. But not every state has a well-financed, high-quality university within its borders. And even those that do have raised the cost of tuition so much that an in-state degree these days costs what a private-school degree did ten years ago.
Of course, the people in these articles are still twits, but the cost of education is a real drain on a lot of the non-twitty of us.
04/16/09
Indubitably.
But now you can secrete words like "fathom" and "acumen."
Sorry... I think I was just reminded of a psychotic college girlfriend that brandished the phrase "patently ridiculous" as a luxury item.
04/16/09
[www.lcurve.org]
Further reading and weeping:
[www.alternet.org]
04/16/09
That's really chilling.
Anything comparable available for household net worth?
04/16/09
Not readily clickable :<
[finance.yahoo.com]'s-Wealth-Spectrum
I think any numbers would be hogwash because it would be a government statistic or based on them and one gets the feeling that the folks up in the top 1% of wealth don't give us any indication of how wealthy they really are. (Maybe there's some sort of way to back into this, though)
04/16/09
"In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.[10]"
I think these numbers, or rather the actual current numbers will look much much different in 2009.
04/16/09
Well done on both. Thank you.
I fear that when you say the numbers will be "different" for this year, you mean worse for the vast majority of the population.
04/16/09
I can't hear you. {La la la la la la}
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