Personally, I find the Bemoaning Billionaires, the ones who whine and cry “woe! woe!” at the notion they should have to pay the same tax rate as us peons in the middle class, to be repugnant. They disgust me on several levels. First, they act like they can’t live on the hundreds of millions they would still have if they taxes at the same rate I am (O, that we should go back to Eisenhower’s taxes for the tip-top; it is but a dream) and that kind of greedy grasping makes me sick. Secondly, they obviously do not give a shit about the country, since they want to dismantle the government and leave citizens to starve just so they can keep more lucre in their hoard. Finally, they remind me of Smaug. They are content that everyone around them suffer provided that they can lounge around on a pile of profiteered gold, but go batcrap crazy if they feel someone disrespects them, or doesn’t admire them, or flat out thinks they are self-absorbed creeps.
That’s not even getting into the fact the asshats worship Mammon and pretend they are playing for Team Jesus. That really, truly chaps my ass.
Apparently I am not alone in my sneering distain for the Bemoaning Billionaires. Thomas Frank just wrote an excellent opinion piece about these Mammon-sucking twatwaffles, and here are may favorite paragraphs out of the whole glorious take-down:
“In the broad scheme of things, these are excellent times to be a billionaire. Labor is powerless. Taxes are low. The banks that survived the crisis are bigger than ever. So why do the well-to-do whine so? Why do they wring their hands?
For one thing, their criticisms reveal a contemptuous view of their fellow citizens. That all the books and articles on the financial crisis and the recession might have had an effect — that people might see the economic downturn as a reflection on the individuals who were, a few years back, lionized as the economy’s leaders — is inconceivable to the class-war complainers. The public’s attitude, they seem to believe, can have arisen only as a result of propagandizing by Mr. Obama. No American would ever stop respecting his betters unless he was brainwashed into it.
It is also a play for legitimacy. In good times, the very rich compare themselves to the Almighty; in hard times they convince themselves that Huey P. Long lurks just around the corner. History, they fear, will repeat its most sordid chapters unless it is stopped right now, and that’s why they act as if a few mean words wound as hurtfully as any program of, say, antitrust enforcement.”
What he said, y’all. What he said.
I made a tax rate related comment not too long ago and had to start looking for some place to take cover. People get rabid about this subject.
Couldn’t Agree more, banks are bigger, wealthy are non-stop Partying on Us, and endless Wars, with Our kids at their Altar, profiting endless, while we suffer. You couldn’t have said It Better.