CNN.com blows the lid open on "HENRYs" -- "High earners, not rich yet." Hilarious. The story highlights Bill Kwon, "a wealth advisor earning $375,000 at Morgan Stanley, with a five-bedroom brick home, a minivan, a son in private school, and three younger kids to follow." I know what you're thinking: where's the part about him not being rich yet?
One thing that every rich person I've ever met has had in common: none of them believed they were rich. Even people who this article would call rich ("hedge fund managers, investment bankers, or CEOs", "net worth in the multimillions") have said to me something along the lines of, "Oh, I'm not rich. I know some guys who are worth ten times what I'm worth -- they're rich." Knowing this is a big part of the reason why I decided early on not to pursue money as a primary goal...it's a race you just can't win.
What really irks me about Bill Kwon, though, is his notion that your income is directly proportional to how hard you work.
""Raising taxes for people at my income level is like being punished for success, for working hard." ...Kwon fears that America risks killing the incentive for people like him by shrinking the rewards for logging extra hours or starting a business, diminishing the dream that brought his father from Korea.
Believe me, Bill, those of us who make one-tenth of what you rake in are also putting in extra hours.
Aspiring HENRYs played by the rules and did everything right: They won the best grades in high school, got accepted at good colleges and grad schools, and worked daunting schedules as medical interns or associates in law firms.
Screw you, article! We blogging Furdells all have degrees from a top twenty university! So we didn't decide to go to law school or med school -- does that mean we didn't work hard enough, because we wanted to do something else with our lives, something that maybe doesn't pay quite as well? I guess we're just lazy?
Mr. Kwon's sense of entitlement reminds me of the words of American poet S. Tyler:
'Cause I'm sick of your complainin'/ About how many bills/ And I'm sick of all your bitchin'/ 'Bout your poodles and your pills/ And I just can't see no humor/ About your way of life/ And I think I can do more for you/ With this here fork and knife.Eat the rich.
Pft. Hell, I DID go to law school and I'm worse off.
Hey; that reminds me: Where's my handout? Obama's been president for hours now…
i forgot how much i hate rich people. when is the revolution going to happen anyway?
I love rich people. They buy stupid stuff that makes the economy turn round and if they're my parents they sometimes give me stuff. They also have the capacity to make huge donations to nonprofit organizations--I make my living by extracting these donations.
Working in nonprofits I've done plenty of research on what "rich" donors give their money to. I'm talking about people who have the capacity to make a major gift ($50,000 and above). The majority of their charitable donations go to Arts and Education.
When their is an "economic slowdown" like the one we're in Arts and Education based nonprofits still do pretty well because they're getting gifts from people who are giving from fixed annuities and other very stable donor funds. They are not giving from their income. The nonprofits that suffer are the social service nonprofits--the YMCA and Goodwill for example are probably not going to do very well in the next few years and may have to cut programs. People who give to social services, from healthcare to job counseling, are generally people who give smaller amounts out of their INCOME. People who make less money generally have more sympathy and think it is important to give to the downtrodden. But if their income is suffering then their gifts will become nonexistent.
The point of taxes, especially property and income based taxation, is to extract money for the programs that are less attractive to rich people from rich people with large capacity to make charitable donations. They're not going to fund these things on their own, they need to be taxed.