Class Warfare and the Hard-Working Wealthy

Let's all use the same lingo here folks. "Rich" in modern-day politics doesn't mean "wet-T-shirt" rich or Paris Hilton rich. It means (2006 data) if you made more than $108.9K you are in the top 10%, if you made $64.7K you are in the top 25% and $32 K+ puts you in the top half of all tax payers!! "the Rich" indeed!!

The highest-earning 1% of Americans earn 22.06% of all income reported; the same 1.4 million taxpayers pay 39.89% of all federal individual income taxes

The lowest earning 50% of taxpayers ($32K/yr or less puts you in that bucket) reported 12.5% of all AGI but only paid 2.99% of total income taxes

The old adage "we spend too much time working to make any real money" reflects the state of the "working wealthy" in the US. If some of the dems have their way the old adage from the former-USSR will be brought back. That is, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

Working hard and taxing all of it of TX 5:42PM September 12, 2008

Your interpretation of the quotes you use and the studies misses something here. This economy produces some jobs with too many hours and other jobs with too few. Many of the poor can only get part-time minimum wage jobs and often cannot get second jobs due to constantly shifting work schedules in their first jobs. So some people want and need more work but cannot get it.

For the American middle class, ours has been a trend toward longer hours for less pay over the last 20 years. Perhaps you wouldn't accept information like that from a sociologist (like me) so I would refer you to Juliet B. Schor, an economist, whose research proves this shift. Most of us would like fewer hours but cannot afford to resist the pressure to work longer hours.

Many of us hope the longer hours will be seen by our bosses as showing loyalty which can be rewarded later on with promotions, etc. But the point here is that we work longer hours than we would want to. More importantly, no one offered us a choice. And, there is no guarantee that the sacrifice of longer hours will be rewarded at all. Longer work hours can mean doing more work and thus be equated with working harder, and many Americans are doing that without it creating any upward mobility for them at all.

But, long hours is not always the same as working hard nor the same as working harder. Research in white collar salaried office work shows that when workers know that overtime work is expected no actual or appreciable increase in labor may happen. Rather, we work slower or take more breaks to make up for the "free" time we are losing by working OT. Overtime cannot be equated, automatically, with working harder.

As the previous respondent suggested, the blog generalizes a lot about the labor market without indicating which segment of the labor market is assumed to be "working harder" in order to get ahea and, through that hard work, actually getting ahead. It certainly is not true, and unproven, for the mass of American workers.

Arguments that the wealthy get ahead because they work harder and therefore deserve to hang onto and enjoy more goodies than the poor (who, by extension, may be assumed to also deserve their own hardships) just aren't empirically proven and in fact are easily disproven. One example: somewhere out there is a mansion and beautiful estate with all the luxuries one could hope for...and who is this hard working person who owns it? The guy who invented Chia Pets. Of course it took more work to then invent a Chia Head.....

In fact, because Americans are finding that working harder has not provided them with upward mobility, more and more of them look for mobility through other means: Lotto, gambling, game shows.

The U.S, is not a meritocracy just because we wish it were true.

Jo M. Dohoney of IA 6:01PM September 03, 2008