blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/10/19/what-percent-are-you -> blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/10/19/what-percent-are-you/
Real Time Economics Economic insight and analysis from The Wall Street Journal. Search Real Time Economics1 SEARCH * October 19, 2011, 6:00 AM ET What Percent Are You?
View all Comments * + 12:12 pm November 12, 2011 Michel Savoie wrote: @ 41,000 I was rated 49%. How does that work when I'm raising 4 children as a single father ? Ask the guy that made this widget how the hell he figures that I'm at 49%. Also interesting to find there are only 4% of Americans who make less money than me. To those who say that OWS is just about stopping financial crimes by rogue billionaires... I feel like that would be a much more defensible platform than the one that seems to be generally put out (I don't live in America and haven't followed the movement closely). I have passionate OWS friends that say it's bad to put limits on OWS by giving it clear goals, because it is and should be about the fall of the capitalistic system, about restoring rights and dignity to the marginalized, protecting the environment, correcting historic wrongs.. I see pictures of people holding up signs, talking about how poor they are, and they seem to suggest that one of the aims of the movement is that they should not be poor, that they should have full, free happy lives in which they have enough and are not sick and don't have to work an exorbitant amount... desirable, but sounds a little like the Kingdom of Heaven too. I'm living in a very poor third world country right now, and it's unnerving the degree to which OWS aims aren't defined, in general, by its supporters. I am afraid of large masses of relatively wealthy and entitled people standing up to demand more. An article in the German newspaper Der Speigel quoted a protester as saying the goal of the movement was to, I believe, "end the tyranny of money." I like this idea, because it involves change in both Them and Me Yes, penalize financial crime heavily, put in better regulations, close loopholes. Yes, make intelligent decisions, work hard to support yourself and don't be jealous because someone is richer and don't think you deserve a cut of their earnings. You really don't need as much to survive as you think you do. You are not hundreds but thousands of times richer than many people in the world, and in the perception of a person in my adopted country there's not a lot of difference between you and Bill Gates. Until we in the West realize the huge volume of stuff that we have that we don't need, and the extent to which we can and perhaps need to cut down our "needs" which we've created for ourselves over the past 100 years, I think we will continue to feed our unsustainable culture of corporate greed. By putting all the blame on someone else (the 1%) we are denying our own culpability in the current system and will be supporting it. I want the slogan to be, We are the X% of the world who use XX% of the world's resources, what are we going to do about it? That said, props to the OWS people for calling crime crime and calling for accountability. I wish the main body of your supporters appeared to take that stance. Corporations shouldn't have gotten a bailout, they should have been closed and their CEO's gone to jail for fraudulent activity. Banks should be held to better standards and those who are corrupt should be jailed. Congress should take a large pay cut, the president should be banned from taking family vacations on the tax payers dime. Garnish the wages of those at AIG and other companies who cheated the system until everything is paid back. Make those who decide to keep the poor in squalor and make the rich richer live off the social security they have robbed. Let them live off the federal minimum wage for five years so they are impacted and know what it's like to be an american trying to live the american dream. Instead of robbing the poor to feed the rich, take from the rich to feed the poor, starving, and unemployed people who are living on the streets freezing to death. "God forbid you ever have to walk a mile in his shoes, cuz then you might now what it's like to sing the blues. They complain because there are less and less funds available to keep ahead of the number of students, number of fires, and amount of crime there is. Funds that might be available if the top 5% payed more taxes to help fix a broken system. They would rather not complain, they would rather be able to help people with the manpower it takes to do so. Without teachers and our system you would probably be wishing you could even be in the bottom 15-20% where so many wish they could be.
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