THE Definition of Rich
A few days ago Pastor Rick Warren asked the candidates the old question “What’s rich?” Obama went with somewhere between 150-250K a year, depending on how you interpret his answer. John McCain said 5 million, in a joking way, depending on how you interpret his answer. This prompted the media to begin asking this question and not answering it in any meaningful way- yet again. Ahh, the perennial story, almost as dependable as “Is The Holiday Season Coming Even Earlier This Year?” or “It’s Tax Time Again!”
I have decided to answer this question once and for all, and if you have enough time to read this blog you are probably not going to like it. First, find out the average household income according to the U.S. census bureau (48,201 in 2006); we will round up to 50,000. Next, double that, so we are at 100,000. If you are a family of four and one person is salaried at or clearing 100K if self employed, you are rich. And don’t give me any of that crap about how you can’t afford a single family home and private school for the kids because you live near NYC or San Jose. Wages for skilled workers usually vary less than 20% around the country, so you are living the big city life and paying the price. That’s a choice. Plus, how many people in this high cost of living place would love to be pulling down that kind of dough? Plenty.
How about the other way to measure rich? Net worth, you say? Being rich net worth wise is easy to figure out as well. Having enough money to live off your very conservative investments for the rest of your life no matter how long you live. The common figure used is 4% of your nest egg. I’ll be generous and give you the 100k income again. The math on that is 2.5 million. So if you have a net worth of 2.5 mil., give or take a paid off house, you are rich. That’s it. These numbers can easily float with the census index. A note about health care/insurance: if you don’t have it, you will still be rich, but you will be the vulnerable rich. Or maybe the dead rich. And that’s just U.S. rich. Here’s a fun little calculator about how rich you are in relation to the rest of the world.
http://www.globalrichlist.com/
Andy Kaufman Makes Me Feel Like…
If I was at one of his shows, I would crawl under one of the tables in the corner of the room farthest from the stage, and then giggle quietly until about an hour after he finished.
Mexico’s Televisa CEO tells it like it is, several years ago, before he died
In the words of the late Emilio Azcarraga, the billionaire head of Mexico’s Televisa: “Mexico is a country of a modest, very fucked class, which will never stop being fucked. Television has the obligation to bring diversion to these people and remove them from their sad reality and difficult future.”
I first read this in Robert McChesney’s book Rich Media, Poor Democracy and found it amusing in its bluntness. It’s almost like he sees his company as a social service, for both the rich and the poor. Distract the poor while enriching the rich. Sounds like our corporate media industrial complex.
As a lingusitic aside, I wondered about the translation of the word fucked. I looked up the original spanish, and he used the word “jodida”. Wiktionary says it means fucking, darned, crappy. So my guess is that jodida is a somewhat less strong word than the literal translation.
What Happens When Everyone Gets Fat?
Will they redo the average weight charts and then everyone will be normal again?
This Just In.
Mind drip produces jarring irrelevancy.
Camille Paglia and James Brown
Camille could have saved herself all that work if she just said “What to know what I believe?” Listen to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” Done.
The Smells of War
We were walking by the Subway. He said he couldn’t stand that smell “It comes from a can.” Really, how do you know? We have the same company provide us with the smells of war. What? Yeah, like exploded ammunition, sick person vomit, rotting flesh, camel dung. Not camel dung! Yes really, it’s like a can of sterno. You pop it open and put it in front of a little fan. Sometimes they accidently put the wrong can in with our shipment, like apple pie on a sunny windowsill. Hmm.. I wonder if they ever sent a can of rotting flesh to the Subway?