The Top 1% Must Stop Insisting They’re Not Rich Right This Instant

[baldguy]

This is a common theme, reiterated everywhere from golf course bars to the pages of various rich person-centric newspapers and magazines: "{Salary much higher than yours} might sound like a lot, but once you consider the cost of living, I'm really not even close to being 'rich.'" Yeah. Fuck you. Today's entry in this category comes in the form of a Toronto Life essay by Jonathan Kay, which is god damn enraging, assuming you make less than $196K per year (the cutoff line for Canada's top 1%). "That's no small amount of money, but hardly the means for a life of leisure," Jonathan writes. OH? "In an increasingly pricy city like Toronto, where we pay a premium for everything from milk to car insurance, $196,000 can seem positively middle-class." Please Jonathan, justify yourself, with numbers.

Break it down, and it translates to roughly $10,400 a month, after taxes. For many Torontonians, that $10,400 disappears fast. Thousands go to the mortgage. For those with young kids, daycare can cost upwards of $1,500 a month. There are the car and RSP payments, wardrobe refreshes, utility bills and something to set aside for when the furnace inevitably conks out. Plus the cost of the sushi, pad Thai and butter chicken that we order in three nights a week-because we're all too tired to cook by the time we get home from work.

Then there's the stuff that fills our houses-the calibre of which is the subject of intense, unspoken competition among my peers and neighbours.

And here we see the fundamental dishonest characteristic of each and every article which advances this particular enraging argument. "Sure, it's an objectively large sum of money," they say. "But it is far smaller after I spend it."

more:
http://gawker.com/5885705/the-top-1-must-stop-insisting-theyre-not-rich-right-this-instant