by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

In checking out another tidbit from these people, I saw this headline, NCBuy Weird News: Horses And Dead Celebs Make More Money Than You (Embargoed Until 6 P.M. EST, Mar. 11) - 2004-03-11, and followed it to the attached story. This is obscene. Marilyn Monroe isn't making $8mil per year, the person or people who own her copyright are raking in the bucks. Shit! For what Kobe Bryant grossed, 1540 people could live comfortably (that's 385 four person families with incomes of $35K/year.) The disparity between the rich and the rest of us has never been so pronounced and so flaunted. I think that this is going to be one of the prime reasons our "grand experiment" in democracy eventually fails. We are, under the guidance of the Bush administration developing an economic aristocracy, and an aristocracy of any stripe is anathema to our founding principles.

In the same vein, I saw something on the tube last night as I was aimlessly clicking through the channels. This report was, I think, on the Travel channel and was about something called a VIP club. Seems this place caters to "high rollers" who think nothing of spending $10K on a night out. Tabs at the champagne bar routinely total in the thousands. The "champagne girls" (as the waitresses--let's call them what they really are) do not find $1000 tips out of the ordinary. OK, maybe waitress is not the right word to use to describe these ladies. This place also has what were once called b-girls who use the allure of sex to get the patrons to spend more. This place is doing a land office business every night in a city (I can't remember which city it was, but it doesn't really matter) where children go to be hungry at night and people live under overpasses.

I know, I know...it's their right to spend their money anyway they feel like. But it is indicative of our misplaced priorities. Maybe if professional sports tickets only cost a couple dollars--for the good seats, or movies were fifty cents a ticket, or music cds only cost a buck. Then the suits and the parasites who feed off the celebrity of the few wouldn't have so much of a pie to split up. It wasn't until we could record performances in both sound and pictures that the entertainment industry became so huge, and it is the suits in the backgroiund who make the really big bucks. For every superstar, there are hundreds, thousands, of others in that same field of endeavors who earn several orders of magnitude less every year. So, how would I handle things? Simple: tax every dollar of income over the first million each year at 95%. Flat tax. No deductions or anything else...I think I'll expand on this in another post.

And thus endeth this particular rant.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005