marksbury

Numbers become more abstract the bigger they get, and we are a country awash in big numbers. Exorbitant sums are mentioned so often in our culture– Tyler Perry made $130 million in 2010, and maybe owns an island!– that at a certain point conceptualizing the reality of that kind of money becomes as difficult as actually owning an island.  So when Mitt Romney released his tax return, and the country learned that he pulled in $21.6 million last year, the number initially seemed like just another absurdly ambiguous sum, the kind of money that makes someone really, really rich (and we already knew he was rich). That number and the way in which it was earned and taxed floated like a huge, context-less bubble above the heads of those of us without a firm background in economics. Even when we see or hear the amount of money Romney makes every year on “unearned” income (never was a financial term more loaded), it’s difficult to make it concrete.

Which is why the widget my husband, Dan Check (let’s just get that out there right now– I am in no way a disinterested observer), created yesterday is so brilliant. He built a fairly simple, interactive tool for calculating how long it takes Mitt Romney to make as much as a user earns in a year. In an ideal world, our work is valuable and valued. In reality, most people are fortunate to hold employment that is even one of those things, and only the very lucky can claim both. Still, key to our American Dream is this conviction that the hard work we do is important and/or getting us somewhere financially, which is why the widget is so jolting. The average American may not be able to understand the reality of a $21.6 million income, but they know exactly what went into the money they made, and what that money afforded and denied them.  To see months of labor– often hard, unappreciated, stressful and difficult– equal a small, cold number (4 hours, 51 minutes…21 hours, 2 minutes) in the scope of Mitt’s immense wealth is depressing and infuriating in equal measure.

In the time it takes me to get my son to his pre-school, have a cup of coffee, try to write something, and return to pick him up at noon, Mitt Romney has made my yearly income. But I don’t ‘work’ full-time, so perhaps it’s not a fair comparison (I’m not going to get into the exhausting labor involved in child-rearing, as I don’t want to awaken the ‘take it to Babble’ trolls). Let’s compare, instead, the most rewarding , difficult and stressful job I’ve ever had. When I was teaching special needs students (English and Language Arts for dyslexic and LD kids, grade 5-12), designing a curriculum from scratch, talking to parents every day, working late to create lesson plans, grading essays, advising teenagers, directing school plays, making yearbooks, chairing the humanities committee, presenting at conferences, writing constant reports, and breaking down at least once a month from the emotional toll of feeling personally responsible for giving children the quality education they deserved, my yearly salary, at its highest (after 5 years), pre-tax, was a few hours’ shy of Romney’s day rate.

I’ve read the comments on Slate about how hard Romney worked for his fortune, how all comparison smacks of class warfare, how the left simply wants to criminalize the prosperous. This is not the issue. I do not like the way that Romney made his fortune (dismantling businesses for profits), but I do not doubt that he is industrious and hard-working. The question is whether his work– and the work/lineage of others in the hyper-wealthy class– is so valuable that it warrants not only an outsized yearly income but an undersized tax rate.

This is the point that the Obama administration has been trying to make for months– the talking points for extending the payroll tax, for instance, centered on the entirely reasonable notion that if you make more than million dollars a year, you could pay more in taxes than someone making $24,000– and which he hammered home in last night’s State of the Union. Unfortunately, just talking about these huge sums is often too abstract, and too often feeds into that wonderful/terrible aspirational quality in Americans, the part that says, ‘I wouldn’t want to be taxed that way, and though I don’t make anywhere near that amount now, I no doubt will in the future.’ But approaching that little widget armed with your annual income– the number that, justly or unjustly, is the sum of your year’s labor– and seeing how paltry and inconsequential it is in the face of Romney’s wealth? The widget trumps talking points, rhetoric and rationalization to show the reality of $21.6 million dollars in all its stark obscenity.