My source comes from Rolling Stone website. The article is a blog by Matt Taibbi, and is entitled “Greed, Excess and Americas gaping class divide”
Taibbi draws on the article in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html?_r=1 to further illustrate the growing class divide. The article explains the expesses and the money need to live a confortable life in America. As Taibbi says in his own article, “The piece was sort of meant to be taken half as a joke, but it is not hard to detect an element of demented earnestness.” If we are to take this article as a slight reference on the economical state of America, it would appear that the majority of American citizens would not be able to survive in New York, without making drastic changes. It is with this in mind that when a salary cap was proposed it immediately caused outrage with those it would affect. “Government should restrict the salaries of exactly the irresponsible greedheads who caused a global financial crisis” Taibbi is however for the salary restriction and his negative feelings towards the people is shown through the naming of them as “greedheads.”
An interesting point that Taibbi brings up in his article is that “It turns out that a great many of the people who make big six-figure incomes consider themselves middle class.” This i find to be quite shocking as to making that much money would be to assume that one is upper class. This therefore leads to a “cultural divide that exists in this country, where the poor and the rich seldom cross paths at all, and the rich, in particular, simply have no concept what being broke and poor really means.” Hear Taibbi tells the reality of ‘rich’ people’s ignorance to what it is to be in poverty.
The article states that the rich are “campaigning in congress to extract more revenue from elderly retirees and broke-ass students while simultaneously fighting to preserve a slew of tax loopholes for the rich, including the carried-interest tax break that allows hedge fund billionaires to pay about half the tax rate of most Americans.” By doing so further expanding the divide between the poor and as they would refer to themselves, the middle class.
If there are to be changes it would appear to have to be done through taxing of the rich, however when these notions are put forward they are met with such opposition. For instance when Barack Obama “considering rolling back his carried-interest exemption, which, again, allows him to pay 15% taxes” he was compared to “Hitler” and thus the divide continues as the rich selfishly refuse to make any changes that would result in them not making or retaining their money.
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