How The One Percent Live (curious? Do u think u know?)
Penthouse parking, a new Versailles, a bat mitzvah bash in Aspen. Salon's guide to the travails of the 1 percent
(Credit: AP/Shutterstock/Salon)
Bankers Struggle at Washing Dishes
Most of us probably think a $75,000 annual salary is a pretty good deal in a nation where the average household income is far below that. Most of us also probably think that doing one’s own dishes is not a form of economic persecution. But, then, most of us don’t work on Wall Street.
In a pair of must-reads, New York magazine and Bloomberg News sympathetically quoted financial industry workers complaining about the crushing pain of life on Wall Street in the era of the slightly smaller bonuses.
The former article quotes an investment banker lamenting that the average $125,000 bonus – which comes on top of an annual salary – is ”only,” after taxes, about “what, $75,000?”
“My girlfriend likes to eat good food,” he complained. “It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.”
In the Bloomberg piece, Andrew Schiff, who makes $350,000 a year, complains that after renting a second Connecticut vacation house for a full month every year and shelling out $32,000 a year on his child’s elite private school, he now “only” gets to “bring home less than $200,000 after taxes, health-insurance and 401(k) contributions.”
“I can’t imagine what I’m going to do,” he says. “I’m crammed into 1,200 square feet. I don’t have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by hand.”
As the unemployment rate still sits above 8 percent, and one in three Americansstruggles to afford medical bills, even the filthiest of filthy rich presidential candidates is at least pretending to empathize with the average American. Granted, they sometimes slip up and expose just how wealthy they are — but at least they are trying.
The same cannot be said of some of these candidates’ cronies in the 1 percent. Whether complaining about having to do their own dishes, or bragging about their car garages costing more than the average American makes in a lifetime, the 1 percenters are all but screaming “let them eat cake” from the ramparts. Here are 10 particularly egregious examples from the last few months.
- David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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