Bill Maher gave a Real Time overdue schooling to the entitled rich Friday night. Below is the transcript of the most substantive snippets of his closing New Rules.
Transcript of the entitled rich schooling
What is with this new trend of people who have all the power acting like they are the oppressed ones? … And most bizarre is the recent wave of billionaires sobbing that they are being demonized and under attack. … I use to think Hollywood egos were the neediest but these masters of the universe, more like babies on a plane. …
Stock trader Stephen Schwarzman, net worth $8 billion, once said that Obama raising his taxes 3% felt like when Hitler invaded Poland. … But with the super-rich it’s becoming a meme. Now we have Tom Perkins, net worth $8 billion, saying the richest 1% are so persecuted in America, they feel like Jews in Nazi Germany. … Is it really that hard out there for a pimp with $8 billion? …
You know even when your shady financial tricks tanked the economy, nothing happened to any of you. Nobody went to jail. Nobody went broke. … You just got richer while everybody else got poorer. The Oxfam Committee released a report this year on global inequality. And the 85 richest people, 85, own more than the bottom three and half billion put together, which is half the planet. This is a real problem. … And not that that Nazi Jew analogy deserves to be taken seriously, but the Jews didn’t do anything to deserve the hate they got. But America’s super-rich?
In the last 30 years even though worker productivity went up 90%, income only went up 8%. If I was working twice as hard and someone else was reaping almost all the reward, I would hate them. And I would also want to know, how could that happen?
Well billionaire Sam Zell knows the answer to that. He said the rest of America should stop bitching about the 1% and realize they are the 1% because they work harder. OK now we need to come after you with pitchforks. … Is talking on a phone in a comfortable office really more degrading than working in a slaughter house or a sweat shop? … With just one real estate deal last year, Sam Zell made a thousand times what this guy makes. Did he really work a thousand times harder? …
It would be great if there were Democrats out there like that now who would say to billionaires, oh you are crying? We will give you something to cry about. You don’t want a minimum wage? How about we not only have a minimum wage, we have a maximum wage. … That is not a new idea. James Madison who wrote our constitution said government should prevent an immoderate accumulation of riches. Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, they all agreed that too much money in the hand of too few would destroy democracy. …
And you know there are some billionaires today who get that. And that’s why they give most of their money away. … As Warren Buffet once said, I should write a book on how to get by on $500 million because apparently there is a lot of people who don’t know how to do it.
Bill Maher smacks down the entitled rich.
This week’s ending New Rules excoriating the entitled rich needed very little context. It was very complete. I simply added corroborating references to his statements. That said, I will add one small thing. If capitalism survives it will be because multi-billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and other signatories to The Giving Pledge give back most of their fortunes to society. Mathematically wealth accumulation by the wealthy is unsustainable given that their rate of accumulation is greater than the growth of the economy, national and internationally.
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