Speaking of inequity, in a nutshell:
[Mitt Romney]makes as much in 12 hours as a median American family makes in a year and he pays a lower tax rate to boot. how does he make all that? By employing shitty loopholes in the tax code and stashing his money in overseas accounts, money he made by buying up and bankrupting American businesses and liquidating American jobs. 1
Again, it’s not envy – it’s the inequity. People don’t envy Romney his wealth, but they damned sure resent the way he’s come by most of it – at their expense. And that’s an appropriate resentment. There are people struggling to pay an average month’s bills, and they struggle because funds like that run by Romney at Bain eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs so that the fund partners could make obscene amounts of money. That’s not envy – it’s an acknowledgement of inequity. And he just doesn’t seem to get it. Romney – and his advisors – can’t hear how offensive it is to say that $374,327.62 is “not very much” money when entire families live for 10 years on that – and struggle to do so.
And once again, I can’t say it better:[A]nd this is the guy the GOP wants to run for president in a year defined by OWS and such visceral across-the-board disdain of the 1%. he might as well drive up to the debates in a solid gold car. 1 Or, as Josh Marshall notes succinctly:
The problem Romney faces is that he’s a living breathing example of what many people see as the problem. And by his stated positions, he doesn’t think it’s a problem. 2
None of this is news, and my observations certainly aren’t original (not that I’m going to let that stop me from making them). I’m puzzled, however, as to why more people aren’t talking about this. Perhaps they’re all in quiet rooms.
1 Thoughts provided by chopper at Balloon Juice – here
2 TPM, January 23, 2012
not very much to you 
Found it very amusing that he’s claiming that he earned all this money, that the wealth he has accumulated was not inherited. I missed the part of his Horatio Alger story where he was born a poor black child to Mississippi sharecroppers and clawed his way up to where he is today. Of course he didn’t.
Also, funny idea of “work.” Not like he’s digging ditches. He’s moving money around. Woo hoo.
His “work” is destroying American businesses and jobs, so they can move production overseas. I’m sure he was good at it–at the expense of all the rest of us.