In this world there are two main types of people: the grapes and the grape-pickers. Grapes are people who work for their living. They may work 2 or 3 minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet, they may have worked their way through college like your brother, or they may be a doctor working of $100,000+ in med school loans. The vast majority of grapes earn under $250,000 a year. CEOs of large corporations, and there are about 500 or so of them, are the exception to this.
Then there are the grape-pickers. These are the guys who make their living off “investments”, from dividends that roll in. They are the string-pullers, the ones who push for this law or that law, who move millions of dollars around which influences where the grapes can live, where they can work, and even if they get to work a decent job at all.
It was grape-pickers who engineered this subprime/ald-A/CDOs housing mess, and they made a lot of money off the little grapes they picked– grapes who are now getting laid off, seeing their houses foreclosed upon, or both.
Grape-pickers make up less than 10% of the American population (probably less than 5%, actually) and have something like 50% of the wealth in this country. Obama proposes to “redistribute” the wealth from the grape-pickers to the grapes. The grape-pickers can well afford it– as Warren Buffett, grape-picker extraordinaire, has happily told the media on more than one occasion.
And quite frankly, both server and homeless guy were grapes in this little scenario. Servers’ wages are not much better than minimum wage; they need those tips to survive. The kinder thing in this scenario would have been to give the server his tip and give the homeless guy a $5-spot. Because as is pretty clear from the essay, the guy writing it was a bigger grape than either of them.
