Hollywood Elite

From dKosopedia

(This is article is about: class warfare, limousine liberals, the Hollywood elite, the New York elite, Forbes, welfare queens, tax cuts, death tax, "I hate Hollywood celebrities so much I voted to give them a tax cut" etc.)

The Myth of the Hollywood Elite

The only thing conservatives do faster than accuse their opponents of "class warfare", is to go right ahead and engage in it.

The politics of envy are alive and well in the conservative world: talk of "limousine liberals", "liberal elitists" "Brie-eating new Englanders" "boutique liberals" and so on. What are they talking about?

The Myth

The Myth is that a few overly-hyped millionaire celebrities can be compared to the secretive multi-billionaires who own the Republican Party.

Two rebuttals

Most celebrities are rags-to-riches examples of the American Dream, born and raised like anyone else. Most republican elites were born and raised as elites. Celebrities are "new money", republicans are "old money".

20 billion (twenty thousand million) is larger than a million.

New Money VS Old Money

Despite there being an entire industry of tabloid and TV attacks on celebrities, nobody can accuse them of being born with silver spoons in their mouths. Nearly all are Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories - succeeding though hard word, determination, development of skill and self-discipline, all in an ultra-competitive industry.

When conservatives say that the rich are superior to other people, one would assume they're talking about rich people who earned, rather than inherited, their money - new money. Any conservative who is full of criticism for the earned money of Hollywood and full of praise for the unearned money of others does not believe in their own rhetoric.

A thousand million is larger than one million

Take a look at Forbes' Ten Richest list. A full half of the list is of people named "Walton". Wow! Does this mean that changing your name to Walton will make you more hard-working, thrifty, and moral? No. Half of the ten richest people in the world inherited their money from Sam Walton, late owner of Wal-Mart.

Each of them have about 20 billion dollars. That's 20,000,000,000. Twenty thousand million.

That means if you want to compare the financial power of a Walton kid to Hollywood millionaires, you would need to fill a stadium with TWENTY THOUSAND MILLIONAIRES.

Want to play a game? I'll name a Walton kid. You name twenty thousand liberal millionaires. Then I'll name another Walton kid, and you'll name another twenty thousand liberal millionaires.

Or I could just name all 5 of the Waltons on the top ten list, and you name ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND liberal millionaires. Then we'll see who has more economic power, unpublicized republican billionaires, or the endlessly criticized liberal celebrities.

And that's just the Waltons. Also on the list is a Saudi prince (so you know my talk of aristocrats is not just rhetoric) and someone who made his money from "investments" - which means that, (unless he started by investing pennies he found on the street) he must have inherited a lot of money.

In fact a study of the Forbes 500 list found that 42% of those on the list got there by birthright.

Now, let's talk about getting money for nothing. Ask a conservative to talk about that, and they'll talk about welfare, and how morally terrible those people are. Getting money for nothing really ruins their morals, they say.

So then, what of getting BILLIONS of dollars for nothing?

Why this matters

In fact, the republicans are making a major push to increase taxes on earned money, whether you're on your way from rags to riches or just plain in rags-to-rags. They will do this by destroying the estate tax, which will shift the tax burden from the welfare cheques of rich kids to other forms of taxation which workers are already well aware of.

Remember, the ONLY way to cut taxes is to decrease spending. Otherwise, all one can do is shift the burden around - by building up a debt by borrowing from China (taxing your children) which result in interest payments which also increase taxes.

Bush has not decreased spending, therefore he has not cut taxes. His "tax cuts" were just shifted onto the debt, and State and local taxes.

Think about it: if you buy things with a credit card, and decide not to pay your bills, are you cutting expenses? No, you're raising them. And that's what the Bush administration is doing.