

Advice for the 'Poor Rich' - jedwhite
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704129204575506051919012596.html

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rick888
"According to the CBO, families in the top 20% pay average federal taxes of
25.1%. The figure in President Reagan's final year in office: 25.6%. "

This doesn't include city, state, and any other number of taxes a person pays.
Most people pay upwards of 40% in taxes. I feel like this was intentionally
left out.

"Mr. Henderson and his wife, an oncologist, make more than $250,000 a year,
and apparently they're struggling to get by"

Chicago has a very high tax rate and housing isn't cheap either. According to
Wikipedia, the sales tax in Chicago is 9.75% (this has been reduced from over
10%). It's the highest in the country.

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akeefer
The point was less the absolute number and more the historical comparison;
taxes on upper income brackets are nearer the lower end of post WW2 historical
norms than the higher end, but from hearing people complain about it you'd
think that taxes right now were close to historical highs.

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eru
If you want a country that does not espouse conspicuous consumption and has an
industrial base, you should move to Germany.

(Of course, in Germany politicians talk about how to boost "domestic
consumption", and a few years ago there was the "Standardortdebatte",
basically whining about how Germany is still an industrial economy and hadn't
ascended to service economy, yet.)

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Unseelie
College students are an amazing representation of our culture of conspicuous
consumption. People move off campus because (at my school) its much
cheaper...and then eat out every night. Why?

Because no one ever taught them that wealth isn't a function of your spending,
its a function of retention. For that matter, so is learning...

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yalurker
I don't think eating out is really "conspicuous consumption" (unless maybe
you're dealing with very-high end, trendy "see and be seen" destinations).

What you've presented seems like a perfectly rational choice: by moving to a
lower-rent apartment they have more money to allocate towards their food
budget. If a $5 burrito saves me 30 minutes of cooking, that's a great trade
for my time/cash budgeting.

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petervandijck
My parents treated eating out as an event, to be had a few times a year,
maximum.

Of course they didn't have fast food, then.

ps: Making a burrito takes 5 minutes with leftovers, not 30.

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adamtj
Degrees in law and medicine are relatively easy to get. It's basically
memorization and pattern recognition, with a little bit of reasoning. An
overclocked monkey could do it. Unforced introspection, self-criticism, and
change in the face of perceived peer pressure to the contrary? Now that's
hard.

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StavrosK
Someone should tell people that if you make $250k and spend $300k, you're
going to be poor.

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aresant
In case you missed reading Todd Henderson's response to the thrasing he's
taken:

<http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/09/20/im-sorry/>

