Number of Deliveries: 5
Sales: $288.92
Tips: $40
Hours: 1.83
Total Wage: $29.86 per hour
I received a text message this morning from my boss asking if I wanted to cover a short day shift. Since I'm planning on a trip to South America (Brazil, Uruguay, & Argentina) with my girlfriend next month, I'll take anything I can get.
While I'm driving around today, I hear this story on PRI's The World, about how some rich Germans want to increase taxes (huh?) on the wealthy to bridge the gap in their budget deficit rather than cut taxes, like their conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel wants. What strikes me most in the story is that the U.S. has the most millionaires in the world: two million. That number seems both huge––oh my God, we have two million millionaires!––and small––we only have two million millionaires out of 300 million people? Come on, America, we can do better than that. It seems like we'd have more when you add up all the movie stars and athletes and CEOs and small business owners. Since no one walks around with a sign on their forehead saying they're a millionaire, I'm not sure how I'd find out how many millionaires I know personally. It would probably be close to the national o.666% (number of the Beast) of Americans, or less than one percent.
And they don't define "millionaire" in the story. Is it a person with a million dollars worth of assets, or someone who makes one million dollars a year? If a couple has a million dollars, are they only 500,000-aires each? And if you buy a house for 200 thousand dollars and it becomes worth 1.2 million dollars, are you now a millionaire? Did anyone keep track of the millionaires that left the club this past year in the market crash, say the poor saps with 900 thousand dollars in assets now?
It seems like when you add all the Rancho Santa Fe people, plus the Beverly Hills folks and the Silicon Valley and Redmond nerds to the old money East Coasters we'd have millions more millionaires. But that's not the case. If I try to add millionaires individually or in small groups––450 NBA players; 750 MLB players; 1,696 NFL players (many don't even make one million dollars); Forbes' top 25 Earners under 25; a handful of lottery winners; a few thousand actors and entertainers; Bill Gates; Warren Buffet: Stephen King; that creepy Girls Gone Wild guy with the private jet––I can't even come close to one hundred thousand millionaires. Two million is a ton. And, according to the story, Germany comes in second place with less than half our number, at 800 thousand. So that's something to brag about, right, America? Poor Germans. And where did they get this idea that if you spread the money around a little, investing in education and whatnot, your country actually becomes more stable and stronger and produces even more millionaires?
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