{"id":33190,"date":"2017-08-20T01:00:29","date_gmt":"2017-08-20T05:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33190"},"modified":"2017-08-09T09:30:51","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T13:30:51","slug":"qotd-the-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/08\/20\/qotd-the-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The rich"},"content":{"rendered":"

During his visit to the U.S., the pope will probably talk about income inequality, and many reporters will nod approvingly, write down the quotes, and then hand them off to the unpaid intern to be transcribed. It\u2019s a big issue. An important one. In the view of many progressives, the ultra-super-rich extracted all their money from the poor. Think of Bill Gates in a homeless shelter, kicking over cots at 2 a.m. and blackjacking transients, demanding they fork over $49.99 for a Windows 95 license, and you get the idea. The ultra-rich have probably pooled their money to develop space-based matter-dematerialization beams just so they can transport the coins from the \u201chave a penny, take a penny\u201d trays at the gas station. <\/p>\n

The \u201crich\u201d are never people like the Clintons, who acquired their wealth by the sweat of their brows, toiling in the harsh icy policy-mines of Davos. They\u2019re not the guys who make a bundle off some clever bit of tech, sell the company, then pledge to spend a fraction of their fortune on outfitting polar bears with inflatable vests to help them survive their imminent inundation in the boiling waters of the Arctic. They\u2019re not people like John Kerry, who married his way into a pile of money derived from a ubiquitous condiment; they\u2019re not people like Apple CEO Tim Cook, because c\u2019mon, he\u2019s gay. They\u2019re not the Kennedys, because the Kennedys could strike oil on their Hyannis Port compound, pay African orphans a dollar a day to work the pumps by hand, build a pipeline that ran through a protected Monarch-butterfly preserve, and the media would still hang halos over their heads because JFK was martyred in Dallas by a free-floating toxic cloud of right-wing hatred that inhabited the brain of a well-meaning Marxist. <\/p>\n

These are rich people, but they\u2019re good<\/em> rich people, because you can imagine any one of them writing a check to Planned Parenthood with the words \u201ckeep up the excellent mammograms\u201d in the memo line. <\/p>\n

No, the bad rich people are hedge-fund managers, people who inherited something, and well-paid CEOs of companies that make things we don\u2019t like or resent having to pay too much to get. They need to be taxed good and hard, according to advocates of the confiscatory state such as the nimbus-haired Bernie Sanders. Nothing says \u201cthe future and its bright new ideas\u201d like the image of a liver-spotted limb thrusting deep into someone else\u2019s pocket and pulling out the guts of a golden goose. Sanders\u2019s proposals were estimated to cost $18 trillion over ten years, an amusing projection \u2014 apparently after a decade the economy just seizes up and we\u2019re reduced to paying for our bread with chickens or bits of ironmongery.<\/p>\n

James Lileks, “It\u2019s Time to Fix America\u2019s Income-Inequality Crisis Once and for All!”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2015-09-24.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During his visit to the U.S., the pope will probably talk about income inequality, and many reporters will nod approvingly, write down the quotes, and then hand them off to the unpaid intern to be transcribed. It\u2019s a big issue. An important one. In the view of many progressives, the ultra-super-rich extracted all their money […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,53,41,13],"tags":[669,225,463,1020,315],"class_list":["post-33190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-billclinton","tag-jfk","tag-parody","tag-progressives","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Dk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33191,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33190\/revisions\/33191"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}