by Linda Grist Cunningham | Jan 15, 2012 |
If your annual household income is $150,000 and you’re living in most of Florida, you’re in the top 4 percent of those who live here, and in the top 9 percent nationally.
You’d need an annual household income of $289,657 to wear the Florida 1-percenter badge and $383,001 to match the national 1 percent ranks. Still, look how close to that top spot a household income of $150,000 can get you.
Who earns that much money here in the Rock River Valley? A two-some household of veteran teachers, cops or firefighters easily make it. Many of the executive director types will do it, especially if they’ve got a paycheck spouse. Ditto the CEO-sorts of the various public bodies and private companies.
Worker bees? Not so much, of course. Two veteran journalists under one roof might make it into the top 13 percent, if they stretch really tall.
The New York Times today posted this fascinating interactive tool for figuring out where your household income falls against the local metropolitan areas, the state and the nation. Try it. Good learning experience.
It doesn’t take much more than a couple making middle-income paychecks to push them into the top percentage income brackets. They might not make it to the 1 percent, but they’re sure going to be low single digits.
I think sometimes we get so caught up in the 1 percent versus the 99 percent rhetoric that we stop realizing the real conversation ought to be less about hard lines and who wins and far more about doing what’s best for the most of us and for the least among us.
by Linda Grist Cunningham | Nov 4, 2011 |
Friday Five: Odds and ends from the week’s world of news.
* That Super Committee that’s supposed to fix America’s fiscal house by Thanksgiving? Well, it’s not going to happen. Not because there are no solutions, but because its hardline Republican and Democratic members have no intention of collaborating. Raise taxes; cut expenses. That simple. A pox on them all.
* The Gang of Six, Simpson-Bowles and the Grand Bargain. That Super Committee doesn’t even have to do the work. They can copy off the kids sitting next to them. There are two perfectly good blueprints ready for the picking, and there’s always the Obama-Boehner Grand Bargain that could be resurrected. I’m OK with copying off the smart guys.
* Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. And, while I’m on my compromise and collaborate rant, might as well toss in this one. Obama wants an infrastructure jobs bill to build roads and bridges. The GOP opposition doesn’t want to fund construction with a tax on 345,000 millionaires. The result? No jobs.
* President Herman Cain? Oh, please. As goofy as Donald Trump or (can’t resist) Sarah Palin. Though I might prefer President Palin to either of those guys. I know Cain’s not going to be on the top of the GOP ticket. No way the party’s controllers, even the Tea peeps, are going to let that happen no matter what the polls say. Incumbent Obama would flatten the pizza guy and there’s no way the elephants will risk that. I’m practicing writing Hillary Clinton as my write-in candidate.
* And, because all that political news can make me crazy, let’s just end with Friday Four. No reason to ruin a perfectly beautiful fall day by obsessing over D.C. dumb clucks.
May God smile upon you and yours.
by Linda Grist Cunningham | Oct 26, 2011 |
Oh, how we love shopping. Think not? Take a few minutes to ponder this consumer nuttiness — the “out of the box” or “unboxing” experience.
I swear to all the retail gods, we’ve made an art of describing, experiencing and reviewing a product just as it comes out of the box. Sleek, smooth, enticing. That ah-moment new car smell. The buttery swish of a leather shoe that’s just so. The Apple iWhatever. Even the new white cotton skivvies we had the clerk roll up and stick in a bag.
One of the whoppers we tell ourselves is that not shopping ensures we will assuredly become “healthy, wealthy and wise.” We believe that Ben Franklin exhortation because somehow we think we should. Some sort of holdover Puritan guilt, I guess.
We lament the credit-card swiping culture that wants three flat screen televisions, a dozen pairs of shoes and unlimited downloads from Kindle and iTunes. We shake our heads at teenagers who wander the malls. At the Sunday afternoon lookers in the Anderson Automotive lots. At the lookie-lous driving from one Open House to another. We really go nuts over pet parents who spend small fortunes on doggie — and now cat — costumes.
(Sidebar: There is a difference, of course, between shopping and buying. Shopping’s more the process leading to buying. Buying is pulling out the cash and wrapping up the box. Not all shopping requires buying. All buying requires at least some shopping. I had to explain that to an irritable hubby several years ago.)
Back to the point. We love our shopping, especially the kind that ends in buying so we can glory in the “unboxing.” Now there’s proof that if we shop-and-buy we can jump start the economy, get the country growing again — and, well, shop some more.
We’ve known forever that consumers are the foundation for 60-70 percent of the U.S. economy. Whether we’re buying cars and houses or those white cotton skivvies, it’s the “little people” — the 99 percenters — who are the engine. We buy and those companies, big and small, make and making means money, which means gotta run the factory, staff the front desk, fly the planes … You get the picture.
James Livingston, a Rutgers University history professor is my new econ hero. Here’s what he says his research proves: “If our goal is to repair our damaged economy, we should bank on consumer culture — and that entails a redistribution of income away from profits toward wages, enabled by tax policy and enforced by government spending.”
The regular dude and dudette. And the government. Government spending and consumer spending are the real drivers of economic growth. Oh, I can see the frothing now….
A proposition: Give up the frugal-til-we-atrophy charade. Go buy something. Shop ’til you drop. Save the economy. Because it doesn’t sure as heck doesn’t look like the “private corporations” are going to do anything except hoard their cash.
Let the frothing begin. The rest of us will be at the mall.
