![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, something weird happened to me last year. I realized I was rich.
My richness won't last; already, the investment-based income streams that got me to this place are drying up, the last bits of stock option awards that stretch back almost sixteen years. Almost all of the money that I made in that time has gone into savings and I still can't afford to retire, but I'm definitely much, much further along than most people. You know that whole "40% of American families would enter a death-spiral of debt and bankruptcy if they had a $500 financial shock" thing? Omaha and I could survive that. And a lot more. In the long-term, my income is going to go down, a lot, in the next three years, but last year? Last year I made bank.
To celebrate, this Christmas we all got new phones, top-of-the-line iPhones and Pixels. We spent a lot of money. And I barely noticed; it was a line item on a chart, a blip on our liquidity account. A big blip, true, but nothing that won't be recovered in a couple of months, provided Trump doesn't start a nuclear war or financial meltdown.
And that was it. We have a lovely house in a middling suburb that's almost too big for us now that one kid is in college; we have four-year-old car that was bought with insurance money after I was struck by a drunk driver, so the purchase of both cars stretches back almost nine years now.
I mention this because, the more I hang out with rich people the less I understand them. Whenever I read about a company that made millions in shareholder profits but refuses to raise the wages of its workers, I get unbelievably angry. It's just a line item. It's meaningless. Nobody will get hurt by it. Not a single shareholder will have to pull in his or her belt a notch to survive making sure hourly wage workers have enough to eat, and medicine to survive. Stories like "Wall Street punishes Alaska Airlines for increasing pilots' pay are insane. I make more than the highest-paid co-pilots in the US! That doesn't make any sense; lives aren't on the line if I screw up, I'm not second-in-charge of a multi-million dollar piece of machinery. I'm just a guy with some well-trained math skills. If my boss keels over in an emergency, it's not my job to get 300 people down to the ground safely.
I just... I just don't get rich people. I mean, I get some of it. At some point, if you're in charge of a lot of information streams, having a personal assistant and being able to pay them is important. Some people are the lynchpins of industry or society; I can understand them having a 10× or even 20× income stream to pay for their support mechanisms, like a personal assistant or someone else to drive and launder. And I don't begrudge buying nice things; I like nice things, too. But 270× is insane. And fighting to maintain that 270× by screwing your workers out of a living wage and fighting to reduce taxes and eliminate public health services, the very services that keep your underpaid support team from coughing up the Black Plague in your limousine, is madness.
It's tar-and-feather, torches-and-pitchforks territory. And I worry we're getting there very quickly.
My richness won't last; already, the investment-based income streams that got me to this place are drying up, the last bits of stock option awards that stretch back almost sixteen years. Almost all of the money that I made in that time has gone into savings and I still can't afford to retire, but I'm definitely much, much further along than most people. You know that whole "40% of American families would enter a death-spiral of debt and bankruptcy if they had a $500 financial shock" thing? Omaha and I could survive that. And a lot more. In the long-term, my income is going to go down, a lot, in the next three years, but last year? Last year I made bank.
To celebrate, this Christmas we all got new phones, top-of-the-line iPhones and Pixels. We spent a lot of money. And I barely noticed; it was a line item on a chart, a blip on our liquidity account. A big blip, true, but nothing that won't be recovered in a couple of months, provided Trump doesn't start a nuclear war or financial meltdown.
And that was it. We have a lovely house in a middling suburb that's almost too big for us now that one kid is in college; we have four-year-old car that was bought with insurance money after I was struck by a drunk driver, so the purchase of both cars stretches back almost nine years now.
I mention this because, the more I hang out with rich people the less I understand them. Whenever I read about a company that made millions in shareholder profits but refuses to raise the wages of its workers, I get unbelievably angry. It's just a line item. It's meaningless. Nobody will get hurt by it. Not a single shareholder will have to pull in his or her belt a notch to survive making sure hourly wage workers have enough to eat, and medicine to survive. Stories like "Wall Street punishes Alaska Airlines for increasing pilots' pay are insane. I make more than the highest-paid co-pilots in the US! That doesn't make any sense; lives aren't on the line if I screw up, I'm not second-in-charge of a multi-million dollar piece of machinery. I'm just a guy with some well-trained math skills. If my boss keels over in an emergency, it's not my job to get 300 people down to the ground safely.
I just... I just don't get rich people. I mean, I get some of it. At some point, if you're in charge of a lot of information streams, having a personal assistant and being able to pay them is important. Some people are the lynchpins of industry or society; I can understand them having a 10× or even 20× income stream to pay for their support mechanisms, like a personal assistant or someone else to drive and launder. And I don't begrudge buying nice things; I like nice things, too. But 270× is insane. And fighting to maintain that 270× by screwing your workers out of a living wage and fighting to reduce taxes and eliminate public health services, the very services that keep your underpaid support team from coughing up the Black Plague in your limousine, is madness.
It's tar-and-feather, torches-and-pitchforks territory. And I worry we're getting there very quickly.
