Giving and Enough?

Giving and Enough?

   You tend to hear it all the time...the 1%.  Sometimes you hear the top 1% OF the 1%.  This is the big money, the money you and I and the everyday person simply cannot picture.  This is the CEO pay so outrageous (and so common) that we, the everyday people, can only glimpse it as a statistic and nothing more.  This is the land of billionaires, and multi-billionaires.

   Ages ago, I remember a shareholder report from Coca-Cola.  It began:  Try to imagine a billion.  A billion hours ago, civilization had just begun.  A billion minutes ago, Christianity arrived on the scene.  A billion seconds ago, the Beatles were making their first album.  A billion Coca-Colas ago...was yesterday morning.  

   That figure is now up, even for Coca-Cola, now making nearly a billion Coke products daily.  This world of the 1% or even the 5% is vastly different from the working wage middle class.  Here's how Kiplinger's Personal Finace summed up this inequity:  Consider software giant Oracle.  For the fiscal year that ended in May 2013, then-CEO Larry Ellison declined cash pay.  But Oracle lavished him with 7 million stock options with an estimated value of $77 million at the time of the grant.  Given that Ellison, 70, has a net worth of some $50 billion, it’s hard to argue that he’ll work harder because of an additional $77 million in pay.  He’d make more by earning a piddling 0.2% on his billions.  But if Oracle divided the value of those 7 million options among its 122,000 employees, each would get 57 shares, which would be worth $663 today.  That could give two or three football stadiums full of people the incentive to head to the mall.  By giving that money to super-rich executives like Ellison rather than spreading it more equitably among the rank and file, businesses make it difficult for their employees to spend on anything but bare necessities.  The entire U.S. economy pays the price.

   Some of this was reflected in the new Federal Reserve Economic Data which for the first time, included statistics on wages.  Another study released today showed charitable giving by those earning over $200,000 declined by over 4%;  for those earning less than $100,000, charitable giving was up over 4%.  And now news that a possible selling off in the stock market has started as noted in today's MoneyNews' article, Billionaires Dumping Stocks  (the link will take you to the article, a scary view that a possible market correction of as much as 90% may occur soon...one warning, the video is a pitch for their book, After Shock, and read the Amazon reviews first, but even watching five minutes worth will let you see the graphs of where our government spending might be leading us and why the market might indeed be ready for another bursting bubble).

   Another angle of this might be the story in India where developers are promising some slum dwellers new housing if they allow their area to be torn down to make way for new luxury highrises.  According the article in Bloomberg Businessweek, "By law, Omkar and other developers must secure the consent of 70 percent of a slum's inhabitants before a project can go forward."  This is viewed as a good thing (Mumbai still has 6.5 million people living in slums) and both the government and slum dwellers are happy to move from an average 90-square foot shack to a new 269-square foot home.  Yes, 90-square feet for a family!

   In the following week's issue came a story of the Buffalo Bills' cheerleaders  (among other NFL teams) being paid nothing, ever.  The article continues:  The minimum salary for a single player in the NFL is $420,000. League Commissioner Roger Goodell was paid $44 million in 2012. It would cost just $235,000 to pay every Bills cheerleader New York’s $8 hourly minimum wage for 20 hours per week for 42 weeks per year, from tryouts in April through the Super Bowl. That works out to less than one one-thousandth of the Bills’ estimated $252 million in revenue. At its most expensive, the bill for an hourly minimum wage for every NFL cheerleader would be about $7.6 million per season, less than a fifth of the $40 million the Dallas Cowboys spent on a 160-foot video screen in 2009.

    Blood boiling yet?  But that wasn't my intention; rather, I wanted to point out the disparity among many working classes.  People give in many other ways, their time, their dedication, their pure generosity of self.  Comparing apples to oranges can indeed make one's blood soar, but high wages and monetary gain, however obtained, are really not ours to judge (okay, perhaps the drug baron or the white collar banking fraudster have a few dings in their karma sheet).

   As one grows older (as Elaine Stritch, who just passed away, said in her documentary, Shoot Me, "but we're ALL growing older"),  it's important to realize just what we can change and what we can't, what matters and what doesn't.  The question is, are YOU happy?  Is what you're doing making you happy?  Absolutely, being comfortable and making those around you comfortable is a cause for happiness.  But beyond that, how much is enough?  Another book, another shirt to add to your dozens, another set of sheets or towels?  At what point --whether you have a hundred dollars extra or a billion dollars extra-- do you say, "I have enough..."

   At some point, whether because of age or wisdom or reality, you realize it's time to give back, to give thanks, to mentor...to not judge.  Enough, I say...enough.