There's no way to independently verify this, but it fits with my experience of left-wing activists whining about wealth:
Many “Occupy Wall Street” protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.
For each of the 984 Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested in New York City between September 18 and October 15, police collected and filed an information sheet recording the arrestee’s name, age, sex, criminal charge, home address and — in most cases — race. The Daily Caller has obtained all of this information from a source in the New York City government.
Among addresses for which information is available, single-family homes listed on those police intake forms have a median value of $305,000 — a far higher number than the $185,400 median value of owner-occupied housing units in the United States.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/02/nyc-arrest-records-many-occupy-wall-street-protesters-live-in-luxury/#ixzz1cZ3G7SbS
There is a slide show
here. My experience is that far left usually means, "I'm feeling guilty about having become a multimillionaire in my 30s," or "I'm feeling guilty that I have grown up very privileged because my parents figured out how to make a pile of money and spoil me rotten."
There are several caveats here.
ReplyDeleteThe figure is only for single-family homes, so all OWSers listing other categories of residence are excluded. Which IMHO would be most of them.
Also, this is for OWSers in NYC, and the median in NYC is far above the median for the U.S. as a whole.
It turns out that many of those arrested are NOT from New York City, but all over the Northeast.
ReplyDeleteHmm, how about this one: My parents are rich and I live with them right now and I'm mad that they're making me pay for my own student loans.
ReplyDeleteI do have some sympathy for those who took on student loans and now find themselves struggling to pay them off. In how many financial situations do you find companies (or the government) eager and willing to throw starter-home size loans to 18 year olds without a credit history?
ReplyDeleteAt 18 you're pretty unwise in the ways of the world, and we expect good results when we throw huge sums of money into the hands of passionate, inexperienced youths? How wise are the "adults" who are doing this?
It is certainly true that our society had a weird mixture of delusionary belief that a college education--any college education--was always a good thing, and some greed by those who liked the idea of making loans to young adults that could only be discharged by death or permanent disability.
ReplyDeleteI am actually prepared to accept the idea of some sort of discharge capability (although the military is already one way to do this for most). But I do expect to see colleges get stuck with some of the bill, and I expect the students to get stuck with a big chunk of it.
Did anyone seriously think that degrees in Womyn's Studies or French Literature were ever going to pay back $30-$50,000 loans, except by tremendous suffering? There's a reason that those degrees are more popular than boring degrees like Accounting or hard degrees like Computer Science or Civil Engineering.