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Opinion: People are not jealous of wealth - they are angry at ill-gotten wealth and advantages!

2023-01-12

People seem to have this weird narrative that people hate the rich for no reason other than jealousy. I am writing this story because it is ridiculous to say that. For many people, disdain of the wealthy has almost nothing to do with jealousy - it is more about how the rich are able to manipulate the system and get riches & benefits a lot of the time without having to do the hard work that a lot of other people living in this country & others do not get. Here are some of the legitimate reasons, people are angry at the rich:

  1. Not having to pay as many taxes in terms of income. As CNBC pointed out in a news article written last year, many companies (such as Amazon, Nike, and FedEx) did not have to pay federal taxes. In fact, at least 55 of the largest companies in the United States paid none of the corporate federal taxes that other businesses have to pay. As Matthey Gardner, a senior person working at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), pointed out in a statement to CNBC: " If a large, very profitable company isn’t paying the federal income tax, then we have a real fairness problem on our hands." People have also forgotten about the Panama Papers - a scandal where papers revealed that a lot of tax info was wrong because the wealthy were able to hide money in enough off-shore accounts to prevent some from paying any taxes (and those who did only had to pay much less than what someone of their income bracket should).
  2. Corporate bailouts: During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a trillion-dollar bailout that mostly benefited the rich. The rich always get bailouts that make it so that even if they run their companies into the ground, Uncle Sam will bail them out. As a study from the University of Chicago points out, these bailouts reduce incentives to avoid failure and give a lot of big companies an unfair market advantage since even the best working-class innovator or businessman will have trouble competing with someone who will get bailed out and get artificially made 'too big the fail' by the government no matter how much they work. And someone might point out how some people see corporate bailouts are necessary to keep the economy afloat, but bailouts like this are how we get to this position in the first place! Bailouts help create businesses that are too big to fail and snuff out the competition that could take the place of a failed business to stabilize the economy if said 'too big to fail' businesses fail. Fifty notable economists point out how this method does exactly that: create a large corporation bailed out by the government that could fail at any moment and, thanks to the bailouts, becomes so big that its failure can cause a large market crash in the future - a crash that is so large because the bailouts lead to a business being so big that no one can compete with them. All of this means when the bailout 'too big to fail' business crashes, it takes the economy out with them since there are few readily available competitors to take their place due to this favoritism towards the rich!
  3. As I pointed out before, 18% of CEOs were found to be narcissists and 20% of CEOs have psychopathic traits. This means we live in a world where many wealthy people are jerks who are hated more for their lack of empathy and the fact that their success can create a negative message for society: be a jerk who does not care about others and you can get whatever you want!
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