The Times and the Post have the story of the boss of a credit-card processing firm who pushed his own salary down from a million bucks a year to $7o,ooo while doubling his employees' pay.
The decision is an extraordinary one when you look at the numbers. At the Seattle-based company, the average salary has been $48,000 a year among its 120 employees, the Times reported. Now, 70 of those workers will see a raise and 30 will see their salaries roughly double. To pay for those huge increases, the newspaper reported, Price plans to cut his nearly $1 million salary down to $70,000, as well as use roughly three-quarters of this year's profits. The report said Price would keep his salary low until those profits are earned back.
According to the Times, Price's idea came from research by Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, who found, essentially, that money can buy happiness — up to a certain point. The duo's research showed that for salaries below about $75,000 a year, increases in income correlated with greater emotional well-being. ...WaPo
Not having to worry all the time about paying for essentials could indeed provide "greater emotional well-being." Hold that thought... Because beyond the Seattle city limits -- out there to the East, on the coastal plains of political mayhem, the Republican party is planning a different kind of future for us.
On Tuesday afternoon, the House Rules Committee took up H.R. 1105, the “Death Tax Repeal Act of 2015,” with plans to bring it to a vote on the chamber floor Wednesday — Tax Day. It is an extraordinarily candid expression of the majority’s priorities: A tax cut costing the treasury $269 billion over a decade that would exclusively benefit individuals with wealth of more than $5.4 million and couples with wealth of more than $10.9 million.
That’s a tax break for only the 5,500 wealthiest households in the country each year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Of those, the 318 wealthiest estates each year — those worth $50 million or more — would see an average windfall of $20 million each, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
And this at a time when the gap between rich and poor is already worse than it has been since the Great Depression? Never in the history of plutocracy has so much been given away to so few who need it so little.
This is the ultimate perversion of the tea party movement, which began as a populist revolt in 2009 but has since been hijacked by wealthy and corporate interests. ...DanaMilbank,WaPo
The tea party movement?
Ha! That populist revolt ended the moment Koch-supplied buses rolled into the tea-sers' first national meeting, buses whose mission was to take the nascent populist movement to Washington as the newest toy of the very, very rich. The left, many of whom joined the tea party during the first months of the movement but dropped out before or during the Nashville convention, need to hold the tea partyers accountable for their stupidity -- or should that be "cupidity"?
