<Stockholm Syndrome>
That's the best explanation I've heard, of why so many people making less than 40K$/y, have ideologies that only serve the interests of people making over 400K$/y.
They feel powerless, are gradually becoming poorer, have no prospects of changing this, so they adopt the ideology of those who have power over them. Makes sense.
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." - Warren Buffett, 2006
Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
nytimes.com |
