What the Rich Won’t Tell You

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<i>They were thinking about where to buy a second home and whether their young children should go to private school. Then she made a confession: She took the price tags off her clothes so that her nanny would not see them. “I take the label off our six-dollar bread,” she said.</i><p><i>She did this, she explained, because she was uncomfortable with the inequality between herself and her nanny, a Latina immigrant. She had a household income of $250,000 and inherited wealth of several million dollars. Relative to the nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is obscene.”</i><p>Then how about paying your nanny enough so that she can <i>also</i> afford six-dollar loaf of bread now and then, also?<p>The remedies for this kind of &quot;guilt&quot; are ready available and quite simple, actually.

I think the waters on questions like these have been significantly muddied by a tax system that really does benefit the wealthy. This and we have around half of congressional lawmakers wanting more tax cuts for the wealthy, as though things weren&#x27;t already easy enough for them. It&#x27;s therefore entirely reasonable to imagine that the average person would feel resentment toward the wealthy and that the wealthy, in fact, <i>should</i> feel self-conscious about that.

The cleaning staff won&#x27;t envy your $6 bread if you&#x27;re also spending twice as much as strictly necessary on your cleaning staff. That is, if you buy $6 bread instead of $3 bread, you should also be paying $21&#x2F;hour to your cleaners instead of $10.50&#x2F;hour.<p>If the judgment you fear is &quot;this person values bread more highly than people&quot;, then just make sure you value people more than bread.<p>Don&#x27;t peel the price tags off. They know how much they&#x27;re paid. They can guess how much your bread costs, because poor people are <i>required by economic necessity</i> to know what consumer goods are worth, and often also how much it costs for market substitutes and DIY ersatz copies. If you buy a fancy leather couch for $12000, the maid will know that you could have haggled the salesperson down to $8000, and maybe also that the same factory makes a similar fabric-upholstered couch under a different brand name, and sells it for $2250, or $1500 if you rent a box truck and drive to North Carolina to pick it up yourself. $500 if you ask Shady McLoadingdock about &quot;damaged goods&quot;. $350 if you also give him some of the finer varieties of cannabis grown in your state. Poor people build and upholster all the couches. They drive all the trucks that move them around the country. They work retail and sales in the furniture showrooms. They have to hustle for everything just to make ends meet. Don&#x27;t think you can fool any one of them just by yanking off a price tag.<p>The only thing rich folks should be embarrassed about is assuming poor people are stupid.

&gt; His wife, whom I interviewed separately, was so uneasy with the fact that they lived in a penthouse that she had asked the post office to change their mailing address so that it would include the floor number instead of “PH,” a term she found “elite and snobby.”<p>Sorry, but fuck outta here with that logic. If you&#x27;re uncomfortable with living in a penthouse, then you should&#x27;ve not gotten a penthouse. Y&#x27;all bought it because y&#x27;all wanted it. (Or maybe her husband wanted it and she was more whatever about it?)<p>Own your purchasing decisions.

The problem with the rich is how much wealth they extract, not how much their couch cost.

This was already posted earlier this week, wasn&#x27;t it?