The Plight of the Rich

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Sometimes people are too eager to take a stab at Nazi analogies. They want to use a historical reference that people will recognize.

  

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Billionaire capitalist and one of the founders of leading venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Thomas Perkins, has written a letter to the editors at the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal published his letter. Thomas Perkins, who sat on the board of directors of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has received some backlash to the letter. The 82 year old capitalist portrays the rich as victims and accuses the mainstream media of promoting “demonization of the rich.”

The Huffington Post has reported that Thomas Perkins wrote his views, making a comparison between the plight of the rich to the Holocaust, called “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?” He was clearly comparing the taxes placed on the super-rich to the slaughter of millions of people during the Holocaust.

The Associated Press’ Stephen Ohlemacher has also written an article depicting the heftiest tax burden on the richest Americans who are “paying some of their biggest federal tax bills in decades even as the rest of the population continues to pay at historically low rates.”

However, CBO data showed that “after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent of households more than doubled from 1979 to 2009, increasing by 155 percent,” while “incomes for those in the middle increased by just 32 percent during the same period,” according to the same article in the Associated Press by Stephen Ohlemacher.

The letter to the editor at the Wall Street Journal by Perkins, who was once married to romance novelist Danielle Steel, proves you can get rich without being very thoughtful, perceptive, or intelligent writes Slate’s Matt Yglesias.

President Obama stated,   “what I can’t do is ask middle-class families, ask seniors, ask students to bear the entire burden of deficit reduction when we know we’ve got a bunch of tax loopholes that are benefiting the well-off and the well-connected, aren’t contributing to growth, aren’t contributing to our economy. It’s not fair. It’s not right,” according to Huffington Post. And while the majority of this post has been critical of the situation, personally, I have had parallel thoughts and have feared that the raging mob mentality that dominated in Nazi Germany and ended with innocence being massacred seems to be present in the eager to blame blood thirsty mobs that hate the 1 percent- whom they hate for hate’s sake. For more information about employment opportunities with the Wall Street Journal, readers can click here.

Image Credit: www.money.cnn.com