The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

Bud Konheim - CEO and co-founder of the luxury-fashion company Nicole Miller - had the following words for 99 percenters when speaking on CNBC's Squawk Box  yesterday: "We've got a country that the poverty level is wealth in 99 percent of the rest of the world. So we're talking about woe is me, woe is us, woe is this. [That] guy making, oh my God, he's making $35,000 a year, why don't we try that out in India or some countries we can't even name. China, anyplace, the guy is wealthy." What this delusional man is forgetting is that the numbers he mentioned don't mean a thing without context. In the countries he listed (and other unnamed ones), the cost of living is much cheaper than in the U.S. Over the past several years, the top 1-2% in this country have experienced a very large majority of the income increases, while the middle- and lower-classes' incomes have been rather stagnant - all while the costs of living have increased. In other wo...

President Obama’s American Jobs Act seems to contain one component which has riled Republicans in Congress and that’s increasing taxes on families that make $250,000 or more per year. They have commonly referred to this component as “class warfare,” to which I have to chuckle. As it states at FactCheck.org, approximately 1 in 50 families bring home at least a quarter million per year, so that constitutes just 2% of the population. With the jobs bill, Obama would be raising taxes on the top 2%, while 98% of the population wouldn’t see their taxes increased. I’ve heard many members of the GOP state that the top 2% are the job creators and it would harm the economy if we were to raise their taxes. With the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy in tact, the unemployment rate is around 9.0% currently. When Bill Clinton took office in 1992, the unemployment rate was 7.5%. Clinton increased taxes to 39.6% and left office with unemployment being around 4.2%, the lowest since 1969. Under Clinton, 22.7...