GOP Overachievers

One of the themes we keep hearing from Republicans is how through their own greatness and hard work they have become rich.  The message is essentially if you are poor, it serves you right.  You should have worked harder.

The thing that seriously annoys me is how people like Mitt Romney seem to conveniently forget the insane level of privilege that they were accidentally born into.  The fact is you could take any average white kid and give them access to riches, incredible education, power, and a stable family and there is a very good chance that they would be successful too.

Willard Mitt Romney was named after J Willard Marriott (millionaire hotelier), a family friend, and his father's cousin who was a quarterback for the Chicago Bears.  Mitt's father was CEO of American Motors and became a millionaire from his stock options.

That kind of money would probably explain how a family of four kids could afford to send Mitt to an elite boarding school whose current fees range from $22K-38K a year.  Or to put it another way, if you wanted to send your first grader to the school until they graduated it would cost you about $300,000 and that's not including expenses, inflation or the extra $35K it would cost if the child boards from the ninth through twelfth grade.

Romney then spent a year at Stanford, graduated from BYU, and then took a four year Harvard degree in law.  Between Stamford and BYU he dodged the draft by spending three years in France unsuccessfully attempting to recruit French people into his Mormon cult.  In three years he averaged one new cult member every three months.  But in all fairness convincing French people to give up alcohol cannot be that easy.

I think it would be fair to say that the cost of raising Mitt Romney from birth until he graduated from Harvard would have exceeded a million dollars in today's money.  Can you imagine how few families of four in the United States have that kind of money to throw at their children?

And this really is my point.  If Mitt wants to talk about having a successful career, that's great.  But it delusional to believe that it was nothing more than being smart and working hard.

By comparison, let's talk about Joe Normal.  He's a fictional guy born on the same day as Mitt Romney.  Joe Normal had to skip on the $300K schooling, so he didn't get to go to Harvard.  Joe Normal didn't have a rich family to pay for the three year vacation in France, so instead he got sent to Vietnam.  He comes back and uses the GI Bill to pay for community college, but has a hard time focusing because he has post traumatic stress disorder.  So he drops out of college, and ends up working for Walmart stacking shelves, although later he gets promoted to department supervisor where he makes $36,000 a year.

I could give you a million more examples of Joe and Anne Normal's working all over this country, busting their asses for the kind of money that wouldn't even pay for a year of fancy private school; even if they had no other expenses.

These people are not lazy or stupid.  They are normal every day people.  But they will never have access to the kinds of opportunities afforded to the rich and well connected.  It is this truth that Republicans want us to forget.

Now I am aware that there are many Republicans out there who were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and made it big, without a rich family.  That's great too.  But it does not mean that everyone else has the potential to achieve the same simply by working hard.  And this is why it is important to have social programs, quality education, and a safety net to protect the poor.  Sadly though Republican egomaniacs don't like that answer because it reminds them that they didn't "build that" alone.  In fact, they probably had help along the way that got them to the successful place they ended up.

And let us also not forget that Joe Normal working in Walmart for an average pay check is not a loser, or a failure.  He did what he could, and he worked hard.  He deserves health care, a reasonable standard of living, and to be respected.  And his taxes should not be paying for millionaires to get a tax break.

Adam Carolla Rich Rant

Recently I was unfortunately subjected to a stream of douchebaggery from Adam Carolla, mouthpiece of the jocktards and thought I'd talk about the content of his rant.

In the nine minute rant Carolla begins by reminding us that 1% of Americans pay 50% of the taxes.  He then talks about the politics of envy, entitled millennials, and then defends the status quo and uses the whole rant to pat himself on the back for working hard, getting rich, and being better than 50% of Americans who are lazy assholes.  Nice.

The obvious counter to the first 'argument' is that while it may be true that the top 1% pay a lot of tax, the deck has been so stacked in this country these days that the bottom 50% of Americans control about 2% of the wealth.  So even if we took everything they had in the world, it would still be less than a 4% tax increase on the wealthy.

He moves on to talk about envy.  He uses the example of the 'good old days' when a man would be walking down the street with his son, and they would admire the Rolls Royce driving by owned by a CEO.  Claiming that now people are taught to hate and envy the Rolls Royce driver, not admire what they have achieved.

But there is glaring difference between the mythical good old days and today.  Back then, the man walking down the street with his son, could put in an honest days work at the car factory and come home and feed his wife and family.  (We'll ignore the issue of the woman being forced into domestic servitude owing to their gender, as that's a separate issue.)  They could probably live comfortably, and the CEO was probably earning just 10-30 times more money than the worker.

In this day and age, the CEO is making millions, probably 200-400 times what the worker is making.  Well I say worker, he has probably had his job outsourced to another country, but pretending he hasn't for a second, his income will almost certainly not be enough to live off requiring another family member to work, just to make a living wage.  Even if the CEO runs the company into the ground, has to take a government bail out with our tax dollars, he'll still make millions and when he retires he'll help himself to a golden handshake of millions more out of the worker's pension scheme.  Then the company will complain they can't afford to pay for worker's 'entitlements' and 'benefits' because some asshole executive just drained the fund designed to pay for all that stuff.

The CEO will have just enjoyed ten years of Bush tax cuts, helping to create an unprecedented gap between the rich and poor.  His team of lobbyists, lawyers and accountants will have ensured that the corporation will have paid nothing in taxes.  And when Obama talks about letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire, or suggest an extra tax on private jets, he'll scream about redistribution of wealth and class warfare.

About the only thing I can partially agree with Carolla on is the sadness of the millennials.  They have indeed been raised in the bizarre world where they have to be 'validated' all the time.  We worry about about their self esteem so much we have to constantly praise them for 'trying' even when their efforts suck.

For a time my wife did some contract work for a well known online university.  Often when she handed out a low grade, she'd get this indigent email from the student who would assure her that they had 'tried hard' and 'put a lot of effort' into their assignment.  The implication being that trying hard should be rewarded, even if the end result sucked.  A pretty stupid lesson that millennials have been taught from day one.

Finally Carolla tied his bullshit together by trying to make the right wing argument that anyone who works hard and tries hard can be successful, unless they suck in which case they should just shut up and accept being a loser.

But most of this crap stems from the ego of a celebrity who believes that the millions they have earned in the entertainment industry is because they are special.  Many really buy into this fallacy that they are just so talented that they deserve what the industry has given them.  This could not be further from the truth though.  For most celebrities, there has been one salient moment when they happened to meet a person with the power to change their lives.  They may have worked hard to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills, but it still came down to chance.

The person who made Carolla famous might have hated tall people, or people with curly hair, or sexist assholes, or he might have gone out drinking the night before and decided to stay home.

So just because you win the fame lottery, doesn't mean you are special, or magical, or better than the person who cleans your hotel room, or loads your bags on the plane.  It just means you got lucky.

If there is one thing that annoys me it is hearing some asshole like this ranting about why he shouldn't pay any more tax, and why the poor need to get some skin in the game.  Most of the poor are working their asses off holding down two, three or more jobs down just to exist.  Don't tell me they are not working hard.  Don't give me this shit about welfare queens.

We've tried the Republican model now for a decade.  That's how long the Bush tax cuts have been in place. And what do we have to show for trickle down economics?  Hmm.  The second biggest recession in US history?  The brink of collapse for what was the largest auto maker in the world?  The major banks and insurance companies of the US getting ready to file for bankruptcy?  9% unemployment?  A massive debt and deficit?  A stagnant housing market and falling housing prices.

If the Republican concept of low taxes on the 'job creators' worked so well, where is the evidence of this plan working?  And yet ask a Republican what the answer is, and they talk about keeping the tax cuts, adding new tax cuts for corporations who are (despite paying little to no tax) 'afraid' to hire more people because of our 'high' taxes in America?  Are you fucking shitting me?

I'm sorry Adam Carolla, but your rant about the rich was just a self serving pat on the back for your fame and fortune.  Occupy Wall Street have a very reasonable point which is that government policy has allowed a tiny handful of people to become filthy rich, not pay their fair share, and take billions in government contracts and handouts.  Meanwhile other nasty Republican policies have hurt and killed ordinary hard working Americans who never got that lucky break like you did.  But I guess it serves those 'losers' right eh?