We are the 53%

I'm sure by now most of you have seen "We Are The 53%", a silly backlash against Occupy Wall Street that confuses lack of opportunities with laziness.  They chose the number 53 based on a report from the Tax Policy Center that says almost 47% of people pay no federal income taxes.  This number doesn't reflect the reality that the overwhelming majority of those people make less than $20,000 a year, but when you're a hardworking member of the 53%, numbers are a triviality. Oh wait...

A symbol of this movement is Frank Decker, who claims that he and his wife used to live below the poverty line while raising three children, but then they decided to go back to school and become teachers.  Now that Frank's comfortably middle class, he has a message for the OWS crowd: He does not intend for "lazy ass people" to snatch up his hard-earned tax dollars, which they would no doubt spend on cocaine and prostitutes.

"You want to 'occupy' something?" he asks. "Occupy a job and start contributing [to society]."

Hawt.

Clever, Frank. But one has to ask, how did Frank and his wife manage to improve their lives so quickly? Was it on their own? If they were living below the poverty line in the 1990s, chances are they were already receiving some kind of "government handout".  And when they went to school, it's even more likely that they received federal funding (because they were poor, non-traditional students (read: old) with children) in the form of Pell Grants or other state- and federally-funded scholarships.  I guess those handouts are only okay when they're being handed to you, eh Frank? Again, wrong-wing stupidity right-wing hypocrisy at its finest.

Another member of the 53% - a self-proclaimed "middle aged 'white guy'" who has "personally experienced discrimination and bigotry" [note: he has a two postgraduate degrees, including an MBA, and seems really bitter about something] - claims that he "personally believe[s] that in life we all eventually get what we earn & deserve. It's a natural law, just like gravity."  He also believes that Goldman Sachs executives ride unicorns to work and are paid in rAiNbOwS & hApPiNeSs! Very cute.

Newsflash: If simply deciding not to be poor anymore meant you weren't poor, there wouldn't be any poor people, and the world would be a great place to live.  If "good people" were rewarded for their virtue with more money and a lower Gini coefficient, there would probably be a lot more people in church every Sunday.

But the the truth is, we don't live in a Horatio Alger plot, where poor people can change their ways and suddenly become members of the upper middle class.  It's 2011, and "Ragged Dick" doesn't mean what it used to.

A lot of Republicans think that poor people are poor because they choose to be. No one actually believes this, especially not the Tea Party fruitcakes/leading GOP candidates who espouse it, and anyone who does is an idiot. The system we live in is broken, and it's a shame that the people it's affecting the most - teachers and nurses and police officers - are doing everything in their power to undermine this important and very necessary movement toward greater equality (buzzword!).

Perhaps what's most unsettling about this working class hostility toward the OWS movement is the irony that poor and middle-class people are actually willing to sacrifice their welfare for that of the uber rich.  Everyone knows the marginal utility of a dollar is greater to a poor person than a rich person, and yet many conservative voters - despite facing very tangible financial challenges - are choosing to follow free-marketism to their graves.

So silly.