From UPI: But the Douglases [Michael and Catherine] are people who occasionally do go to work, on movie sets, where they're likely to notice some minimum-wage production assistants bringing them coffee. They presumably have a state-of-the-art entertainment center that does receive CNN. I presume they've occasionally been sent a script that has actual working-class people in it. In other words, they must know, at some level, that "some people in this room" who think $1.6 million is more than a pittance represent approximately 99.9 percent of the people in the world.

To put that $1.6 million in perspective: If you placed that money in the lowliest passbook savings account, the kind the Douglases will never have because it's for people who only have $500 to start with, and you get the lowest interest rate paid anywhere in the world -- currently around 1.8 percent -- you earn $28,800 a year, enough for some families to survive on.

The idea that 1.8 percent of what they call a pittance is a living wage somewhere, and that they don't realize it, is a testament to just how divided by class we've become. (More also found at "The Daily Dish".)

posted at 03:56 AM | link--it | mail it | (4) shout it