During the campaign, many people expressed outrage over Mitt Romney’s statement concerning the fact that almost fifty percent of the public do not pay pay income taxes. I well understood the anger, but I am a bit surprised that a video by the California Federation of Teachers has not produced the same outrage over its unfairness and frankly crudeness. The video shows a wealthy person urinating on the poor as part of a “Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale.” I readily admit that I am in the minority on our blog in opposing some of the tax increase proposals in this country and abroad as economically unwise. However, the demonization of the wealthy in this country has gone a bit far when a video of this kind is released by a major organization.
Real Clear Politics and a few sites ran a story on the urination scene, but the video below has the sound but not the image of actual urination. It is not clear if someone added the yellow image to the video or the producers removed the image. When you now hit on various sites that showed what they said was the image of the urination, a sign pops up that this is now a “private video.” I am unsure of what that means since the union reportedly put the video out to the public. However, there is no mention of the controversy that I could find on the union site.
The eight-minute video was written and directed by California Federation of Teachers’ communications director Fred Glass with voice over by Ed Asner. The mythical land describes rich evading taxes by investing in “Wall Street” — not quite mythical. “Don’t worry. This is good for you, too. Because it will trickle down from us to you.” You can still hear the sound of the rich man “trickling down” on the poor.
Viewers are urged to email their elected representatives to tell them to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to fund public services.
I happen to agree with the premise of raising revenues (though I oppose some of the tax proposals in this country and abroad). I am a long and vocal supporter for increasing funding for schools and teachers. However, I view this video as unfair and hyperbolic even without the yellow stream. The wealthy do pay considerable taxes and many support public programs and public causes. They also do pay the vast majority of taxes. Should they pay more in this economy. Yes, but it is grossly unfair to engage in this type of vilification. The video for example states that after the housing market crash the government printed money for “rich people” but they didn’t give any to “ordinary people whose houses and jobs were broken by the crash.” The video also states that after the collapse that rich people “love their money more than anything in the world.” That is simply outrageous. What would be the reaction to a business group releasing a video stating poor people do not care for other people and do not want to work? There would be justified anger and outrage, but the reaction to this video seems to be muted from the left. It is not enough to simply shrug and again blame the other side triggering such responses. Whatever the excesses of the other side of this debate, it does not relieve adults of being the obligations of accuracy and decency. As an educator myself, I am embarrassed to see any teacher’s organization engage in such attacks.
I am interested in whether the union did include the even more offensive image and removed it or whether it is claiming that conservative groups hacked their video. If it is the former, I do not believe that they have served the interests of teachers who generally strive to engage in reasoned and respectful debate. If it is the latter, I would love to know who added the yellow image and left the appearance that it was in the original video. The union itself has thus far said little on the controversy. [UPDATE: the original video is posted here and shows the yellow image. It would appear that the union has altered its own video though I cannot find any statement from it on this controversy].
The current video is shown below.
“WASHINGTON — Hovering in the background of the “fiscal cliff” debate is the prospect of 2 million people losing their unemployment benefits four days after Christmas.
“This is the real cliff,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. He’s been leading the effort to include another extension of benefits for the long-term unemployed in any deal to avert looming tax increases and massive spending cuts in January.
“Many of these people are struggling to pay mortgages, to provide education for their children,” Reed said this past week as President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, rejected each other’s opening offers for a deficit deal.
Emergency jobless benefits for about 2.1 million people out of work more than six months will cease Dec. 29, and 1 million more will lose them over the next three months if Congress doesn’t extend the assistance again.
Since the collapse of the economy in 2008, the government has poured $520 billion – an amount equal to about half its annual deficit in recent years – into unemployment benefit extensions.
White House officials have assured Democrats that Obama is committed to extending them another year, at a cost of about $30 billion, as part of an agreement for sidestepping the fiscal cliff and reducing the size of annual increases in the federal debt.
“The White House has made it clear that it wants an extension,” said Michigan Rep. Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.” Huffington Post
ElaineM is burning rubber today.
When does the revolution start.
Spends more on corporate welfare than social welfare!! Financial services produces money from money for the monied!!! And drains the rest of the economy.
Love the smell of burning rubber when the rabble is up.
You are reduced to rabble in THEIR eyes, you know. in spite of your education and skills.
Smell of napalm in the morning, surf’s up. Charlie don’t surf.
Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” FOUND!
Monday, 03 December 2012 16:17
By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks , The Daily Take | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13127-reagans-welfare-queen-found
Excerpt:
Good news everyone, after more than thirty years of searching by the news media, Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Welfare Queen” has finally been found. She lives in Bentonville, Arkansas.
“She has eighty names, thirty addresses,” Reagan warned during his 1976 run for President about a nameless, Cadillac-driving woman who’s conning the social safety net. He added: “She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” In total, Reagan said, “Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”
For more than thirty years, Republicans have used the existence of this “Welfare Queen” to justify their attacks on public spending and prove that the “welfare state” has run amok. Yet, her identity has never been revealed. After decades of searching, the best and brightest minds in the field of journalism were never able to discover who’s behind the wheel of the “Welfare Queen’s” Cadillac, or if she even existed.
That is until now.
We now realize our mistake. In our search for this “Welfare Queen,” we were looking for actual people when we should have been looking for corporate people. We should have been looking at Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is the largest private employer and brought in more revenue in 2011 than any other company in the nation. Wal-Mart pocketed a not-too-shabby $16.4 billion in profits that same year and the six Wal-Mart heirs, the Walton family, own roughly $100 billion in wealth, which is more than 40% of Americans combined.
But, despite making all of this money, Wal-Mart’s business model hinges on mooching from the government. It hinges on being the biggest “Welfare Queen” in the United States.
Because of the “everyday low wages” that the retail giant pays its employees, our government has to step in and provide public assistance to Wal-Mart workers just so they can survive…which is why the Wal-Mart workforce represents the largest recipient of federal aid in the nation.
A Wal-Mart worker makes on average 31% less than a worker for any other large retailer, and requires 39% more in public assistance.
A recent study by UC Berkeley found that Wal-Mart’s low wages are costing the state of California alone $86 million a year to provide public assistance like food stamps and healthcare to the retailer’s 44,000 low-wage employees in the state. The state spends nearly $2,000 every single year on each Wal-Mart employee who can’t afford basic essentials like housing, food, and healthcare with their Wal-Mart paycheck.
In total, it’s estimated that Walmart stores loot more than $2.6 billion every single year from the federal government in the form of tax-payer funded public assistance to their employees. That includes more than one billion in healthcare costs associated with Medicaid, and $225 million in free or reduced-price lunches for school children of Wal-Mart employees.
And now, as reported by the Huffington Post, Wal-Mart is planning to loot even more from us taxpayers, as the giant corporation adopts a new healthcare policy that will deny insurance for any employees working fewer than 30 hours a week.
Wal-Mart routinely forces their workers into part-time schedules, working fewer than 30 hours a week, so many will lose their health insurance under this new policy. When asked for comment by the Huffington Post on how many workers will be affected, Wal-Mart declined to answer.
Make no mistake about it, while it may be individual Wal-Mart employees who are collecting government benefits, the corporation itself benefits tremendously.
If the government didn’t step in to provide food assistance, Wal-Mart couldn’t operate with a team of emaciated workers unable to lift ballets of canned foods or count back the correct change at the checkout lanes.
Retailers (Legally) Skimming Sales Taxes Paid by Customers
11/25/2008
http://www.ilsr.org/retailers-legally-skimming-sales-taxes-paid-customers/
Excerpt:
Little-noticed laws in more than half the states allow retailers to keep a portion of the sales taxes they collect from shoppers. The practice is costing states over $1 billion a year and lining the pockets of large chains, notably Wal-Mart.
These are the conclusions of Skimming the Sales Tax, a comprehensive national study of the issue just released by Good Jobs First, a non-profit research center based in Washington, DC.
The eye-opening report comes at a time when many states are facing severe budget deficits, forcing service cuts and tax increases. “This legal skimming is depriving governments of desperately needed revenue,” said Good Jobs First Executive Director Greg LeRoy.
*****
Skimming the Sales Tax:
How Wal-Mart and Other Big Retailers (Legally) Keep a Cut of the Taxes We Pay on Everyday Purchases
by Philip Mattera with Leigh McIlvaine
Good Jobs First
November 2008
http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/skimming.pdf
Free Lunch, Corp Welfare, Bill Moyers and David Cay Johnston
About Powell, from the Truthout link:
Mark Karlin: Heist makes much of the infamous Lewis Powell memo as the founding document, the call to arms and strategic inspiration for the modern corporate dominance of the political debate in the US. We asked Donald Goldmacher about Powell’s crucial memo. He responded:
Lewis Powell was a corporate attorney from Virginia who was asked by his friend at the US Chamber of Commerce to write a secret strategy memorandum for the chamber in 1971. Two months later, Richard Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he served a number of years. The memo became a rallying cry among corporate executives for how to reassert corporate dominance over the American economy and its government, which it had lost during the era of the New Deal. The memo openly stated that corporations should punish their political enemies and should seek political power through both the law and politics. It encouraged challenges to what it saw as left-wing activities by people such as Ralph Nader and US academics. By 1978, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable defeated pro-labor law reforms through a filibuster by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, which signaled the demise of organized labor as a significant opponent of organized money.
(Thanks for the Powell links, Elaine M.)
Romney, corporate welfare king
Mitt’s use of subsidies and tax loopholes at Bain directly contradicts his “free market” ideals
BY JOSHUA HOLLAND, ALTERNET
1/19/12
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/19/romney_corporate_welfare_king/
Excerpt:
The lion’s share of the wealth Mitt Romney accumulated during his years at Bain Capital was extracted not only by laying off workers and raiding their pensions, but by using what conservatives call “big government” to redistribute wealth from taxpayers to Bain’s investors and partners.
Bain Capital was not in the business of creating jobs, or even saving companies over the long-term. Its model had a relatively low rate of success; a study by Deutche Bank found that 33 out of 68 major deals cut on Romney’s watch lost money for the firm’s investors. Its richest deals made up for the flops, however, and Bain’s partners were guaranteed hefty fees regardless of how the businesses they “restructured” ultimately performed.
Romney and his partners then exploited a loophole in the tax code that allowed them to pay just 15 percent of their growing fortunes in taxes — a rate less than what many of their companies’ employees forked over to Uncle Sam.
“By and large, [government] gets in the way of creating jobs,” Romney said during a GOP debate last year. But, as the Los Angeles Times noted, “during his business career Romney made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be ‘corporate welfare.’”
On the campaign trail, Romney often touts a successful investment in an Indiana steel company called Steel Dynamics, but he doesn’t mention that the firm had taken advantage of “generous tax breaks and other subsidies provided by the state of Indiana and the residents of DeKalb County, where the company’s first mill was built.”
After reading the full article for which ap provided the link, the cartoon cited as the subject of this thread seems a mild reaction to the reality of our lives.
Financial Sector Costs Us More than Any Other Sector In Economy
The financial sector receives more of the average paycheck than any other sector of the economy. Its share of the economy totals $2 trillion dollars.
From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector earned less than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. in the 1960s, finance and insurance accounted for only 4% of GDP, whereas in 2007 finance and insurance accounted for 8% of GDP.
The purpose of the financial services industry is basically to transfer money from savers to entrepreneurs. It primarily consists of using a computer to shift money from one bank account to another. This service requires virtually no physical labor and very few material resources.
Yet, this relatively simple service cost our country more than $2 trillion in 2007. That was more than the country spent on health care, construction, food, utilities and transportation.
It’s clearly unreasonable for this financial paper shuffling to cost us more than the construction of the skyscraper where the paper shuffling will then take place. How does this industry get us to spend such an inordinate amount of money on their services. Through smoke and mirrors as the recent crisis has shown us.
The free market system automatically optimizes resource allocation to satisfy society’s wants and needs. The current problems in our financial sector can be seen as our economy’s attempt to reduce the excessive size of the financial sector and redirect those resources to more productive purposes. Yet, the government is doing everything in its power to counteract this process. The feds have taken or committed to take over $12 trillion from the other sectors and given them to financial institution to maintain this imbalance. This works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/financial-sector-takes-largest-share-of-gdp/
Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare Programs
Time Magazine, Vol. 152 No. 19
http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/corporate-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/
Excerpt:
About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.
Before we look at the details, a heartfelt plea from the Save the CEO’s Charitable Trust:
There’s so much suffering in the world. It can all get pretty overwhelming sometimes. Consider, for a moment the sorrow in the eyes of a CEO who’s just found out that his end-of-year bonus is only going to be a paltry $2.3 million.
“It felt like a slap in the face. Imagine what it would feel like just before Christmas to find out that you’re going to be forced to scrape by on your standard $8.4 million compensation package alone. Imagine what is was like to have to look into my daughter’s face and tell her that I couldn’t afford to both buy her a dollar sign shaped island and hire someone to chew her food from now on, too. To put her in that situation of having to choose… She’s only a child for God’s sake.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. Thanks to federal subsidies from taxpayers like you, CEO’s like G. Allen Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland was able to take home almost $14 million in executive compensation last year. But he’s one of the lucky ones. There are still corporations out there that actually have to provide goods and services to their consumers in order to survive. They need your help.
For just $93 billion a year the federal government is able to provide a better life for these CEO’s and their families. That’s less than the cost of 240 million cups of coffee a day. Won’t you help a needy corporation today?
The Traditional Welfare Queen
Definition: social welfare
n. Financial aid, such as a subsidy, provided by a government to specific individuals.
When one thinks about government welfare, the first thing that comes to mind is the proverbial welfare queen sitting atop her majestic throne of government cheese issuing a royal decree to her clamoring throngs of illegitimate babies that they may shut the hell up while she tries to watch Judge Judy. However, many politically well-connected corporations are also parasitically draining their share of fiscal blood from your paycheck before you ever see it. It’s called corporate welfare. The intent here is to figure out which presents the greater burden to our federal budget, corporate or social welfare programs.
There are, of course, positive and negative aspects to this spending.The primary negative aspect is that you have to increase taxes to pay for it. Taxing individuals lowers their standard of living. It reduces people’s ability to afford necessities like medical care, education, and low mileage off-road vehicles.The common usage definition of social welfare includes welfare checks and food stamps. Welfare checks are supplied through a federal program called Temporary Aid for Needy Families. Combined federal and state TANF spending was about $26 billion in 2006. In 2009, the federal government will spend about $25 billion on rental aid for low-income households and about $8 billion on public housing projects. For some perspective, that’s about 3 percent of the total federal budget.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48800646/6_Million_Gets_You_Into_1_at_40_But_Not_at_60
How corporate socialism destroys
By David Cay Johnston
JUNE 1, 2012
http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2012/06/01/how-corporate-socialism-destroys/
Excerpt:
IRONDEQUOIT, N.Y. — A proposal to spend $250 million of taxpayer money on a retail project here illustrates the damage state and local subsidies do by taking from the many to benefit the already rich few.
Nationwide state and local subsidies for corporations totaled more than $70 billion in 2010, as calculated by Professor Kenneth Thomasof the University of Missouri-St. Louis
In a country of 311 million, that’s $900 taken on average from each family of four in 2010. There are no official figures, but this one is likely conservative because — as documented by Thomas, this column and Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations — these upward redistributions of wealth keep increasing.
In Irondequoit, just outside Rochester, N.Y., and a few miles from where I live, developer Scott Congel wants $250 million in sales taxes to finance rebuilding the Medley Centre mall while adding condominiums and a hotel. Typically local governments issue bonds, which are paid off using sales tax receipts that are diverted from public purposes to the developer’s benefit.
Subsidies for retail businesses are the worst kind of corporate welfare because, as the end of the economic chain, retailing grows only when population and incomes increase. If population or income falls, then subsidies for new projects like Congel’s damage existing businesses, where people would otherwise be spending their money.
The mall, which struggled from the start, was built in 1990 for $140 million in today’s dollars. A Congel associate, Adam Bersin, bought it in 2005 for less than $6 million in today’s dollars. He then persuaded the Monroe County industrial development agency to issue $5.4 million in bonds and then flipped the real estate to Congel in 2007.
Today the mall is empty, its doors sealed, except for a Sears at one end and a Macy’s at the other, each with a handful of customers during my visits.
Congel promised a $260 million project, but five years on nothing is built and Congel is seeking delays in fulfilling promises for which the mall was granted property tax breaks.
That’s how corporate socialism works – taxpayers contribute when the market rejects.
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/top-1-percent-earn.aspx Here is another one that puts it art 343,000, idealist. Most of the info I have seen agrees with this. Now that 350,000 will go a lot farther in the south and the midwest than on the coasts. If you are in your sixties, you need assets of 11 million to be in the top 1%. The extremely wealthy are in the .01%. If you look at the stats the average yearly earnings in the US are low. It is different in Sweden where the extremes at the top and bottom are not so prevalent.
I thought it was in Truthout that I read that it stood: “Not Right to Work, but NO RIGHT TO NEGOTIATE.” As for fireman and police exceptions, you can put Homer in charge of a nuke plant, but not a fire engine, and definitely not a pistol.
SwM.
You know stats are confuseing and cometimes lie. How much do you believe that the threshold to being a one-percenter is 380,000 per year?
Seems like I saw an average figure and a average worth were much higher. Of course the extreme could draw the averages and the median up.
Lastly, can anyone say how much a return of pre-Bush tax rates will bring in towards “saving” Medicaid, Medicare, SS, childrens health programs–you know all the stuff in the Ryan budget???
Maybe an earlier higher level is needed.
Obama doesn’t understand the basics of negotiating. Come out at 10 times what your need is, and fight like hell. Send him to school in any ME country.
AY,
What You Need To Know About The Michigan GOP’s ‘Right-To-Work’ Assault On Workers
By Travis Waldron on Dec 7, 2012
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/12/07/1300981/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-michigan-gops-right-to-work-assault-on-workers/
Excerpt:
THE LEGISLATION: Both the state House and state Senate passed legislation on Thursday that prohibits private sector unions from requiring members to pay dues. The Senate followed suit and passed a different but similar measure that extends the same prohibition for public sector unions, though firefighters and police officers are exempt. The state House included a budget appropriations provision that is intended to prevent the state’s voters from being able to legally challenge the law through a ballot referendum. Due to state law, both houses are prevented from voting on legislation passed by the other for five days, so neither will be able to fully pass the legislation until Tuesday at the earliest.
THE PROCESS: Union leaders and Democrats claim that Republicans are pushing the legislation through in the lame-duck session to hide the intent of the measures from citizens, and because the legislation would face more trouble after the new House convenes in January. Michigan Republicans hold a 63-47 advantage in the state House, but Democrats narrowed the GOP majority to just eight seats in November. Six Republicans opposed the House measure; five of them won re-election in 2012 (the sixth retired). And Michigan Republicans have good reason to pursue the laws without public debate. Though the state’s voters are evenly split on whether it should become a right-to-work state, 78 percent of voters said the legislature “should focus on issues like creating jobs and improving education, and not changing state laws or rules that would impact unions or make further changes in collective bargaining.”
THE CONSEQUENCES: While Snyder and Republicans pitched “right-to-work” as a pro-worker move aimed at improving the economy, studies show such legislation can cost workers money. The Economic Policy Institute found that right-to-work laws cost all workers, union and otherwise, $1,500 a year in wages and that they make it harder for workers to obtain pensions and health coverage. “If benefits coverage in non-right-to-work states were lowered to the levels of states with these laws, 2 million fewer workers would receive health insurance and 3.8 million fewer workers would receive pensions nationwide,” David Madland and Karla Walter from the Center for American Progress wrote earlier this year. The decreases in union membership that result from right-to-work laws have a significant impact on the middle class and research “shows that there is no relationship between right-to-work laws and state unemployment rates, state per capita income, or state job growth,” EPI wrote in a recent report about Michigan. “Right-to-work” laws also decrease worker safety and can hurt small businesses.
Powell Memo: U.S. Chamber Of Commerce
anonymously posted,
Thanks for the link. I remember reading about that Lewis Powell memo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaSOyER_Tgo
The Birth of Everything Corporatist and Conservative
AY,
Thanks for that information about police and firefighters being exempted. Isn’t that discriminatory?
The Corporate “Heist” of the United States Government Began With a Memo in 1971
Friday, 07 December 2012 00:00
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/13166-the-corporate-heist-of-the-united-states-government-began-with-a-memo-in-1971
Excerpts
Narrated by Thom Hartmann, and produced and directed by Donald Goldmacher and Frances Causey, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream in Broad Daylight? is a comprehensive dissection of the evolution of corporate control over the federal government. Stephen Holden of the New York Times wrote that Heist “has the virtue of taking the long view of a crisis that recent films like Inside Job and Too Big to Fail have only sketchily explored. It makes a strong case that government regulation of business is essential for democracy to flourish.”
…
Mark Karlin: Given the growth in global corporations, reinforced by international trade agreements favorable to businesses and not workers, isn’t the pressure on national governments such as the US coming from, in some ways, a shadow corporate power base that transcends international boundaries?
Thom Hartmann: Yes, absolutely. For four generations conservatives have been hysterical about the loss of American sovereignty because of first the League of Nations and then the United Nations. But the real threat to American sovereignty comes from transnational corporations who have assembled themselves into transnational institutions like the World Trade Organization, and can now overturn laws passed by federal and state legislatures.
This is one of those areas where even the conservative base, the middle-American “Joe six-packs,” know that transnational corporations and unfettered free trade are destructive to the interests of the United States. But you’ll never hear a word of it in our corporate media, which is largely owned by those same transnational corporations.
Mark Karlin: Isn’t this also true of Wall Street financial speculation? If Wall Street crashes due to its reckless speculation, than financial institutions around the world are impacted. Sovereignty over economic interests is in rapid decline, it would appear.
Thom Hartmann: Yes. And bank revenues and risks are now pretty much back to where they were in 2007. If something isn’t done to reign these people in, get ready for a real national and international disaster, most likely followed by a world war.
Mark Karlin: Much of Heist focuses on Wall Street’s “Get Out of Jail Free Card” in the collapse of the US and international economy a few years back. Recently, BP was assessed a record fine, but no executives will be charged or prosecuted. Is it safe to say that there are people who are “too big” to go to jail?
Thom Hartmann: Yes. While white America is just waking up to this, people of color have known for centuries that America has two criminal justice systems: one for the very, very rich, and another for everybody else. Increasingly, our stratification is breaking along the lines of class rather than color. And the bankster class is, for the moment, untouchable.
Mark Karlin: What is your reaction to the notion that the Heist of democracy for corporate and personal enrichment could not be carried out with a two-party duopoly. Even if one concedes differences between Democrats and Republicans on social issues, the social safety net and taxing the rich, the corporate dominance of the government appears firmly intact, doesn’t it?
Thom Hartmann: Yes, but that’s pretty much what Herbert Hoover thought when he was elected in 1928, and what The British East India Company thought in 1773. I don’t think we’ve reached the point of no return; if anything, it looks to me like we are on the verge of a new great awakening. The possible tragedy is that it may – probably – will take a horrific crash to fully bring it about.
“The price of being a One Percenter might seem like a simple number. For income, it’s around $380,000 a year. For wealth, it’s a total net worth of $8.4 million.” CNBC