Demonizing the wealthy is 100 percent wrong

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Updated: February 18, 2012 8:16AM

I have a confession to make. I aspire to be part of the 1 percent.

Is that wrong?

I don’t really think so, which makes it slightly disingenuous of me to label this a confession.

But considering all the angry things that have been said or written about the 1 percenters during the past year, I almost feel guilty admitting that I, too, would like to be wealthy.

What’s more, I suspect at least 95 percent of my fellow Americans in the 99 percent would prefer to be in the 1 percent as well, if we just could figure out how to get there.

That raises an interesting question: If you or I were to be so fortunate during the coming year — through luck, smarts, hard work or some combination thereof — to achieve enough financial success to exceed this now-mythic 1 percent income threshold, should that automatically make us worthy of everyone else’s contempt?

And if not, could we agree right now before this election year unfolds any further that all this rhetoric pitting the 99 percent versus the 1 percent is not a particularly healthy or even honest way to conduct the discussion?

Sure, it’s catchy and gets people’s attention, which has its benefits, but ultimately it’s not helpful toward achieving anyone’s broader goals of social and economic justice, whatever those may be.

Those goals might include such things as a more equitable tax structure, stronger limits on executive compensation or other methods of reducing the concentration of wealth in a relative few.

There are many members of the 1 percent who might support such goals and many more members of the 99 percent who most likely would oppose them, depending on their political perspectives.

To the extent some are using the 99 percent versus the 1 percent as convenient shorthand for the widening gap between rich and poor, I can appreciate that.

But it makes no sense to define as the enemy a group for which you secretly yearn to be a part. (If you don’t have that yearning, then why did you buy that lottery ticket?)

Don’t read this as a knock on the Occupy crowd. I kind of like them, in fact.

I especially appreciate that they changed the national conversation to allow us to recognize there are broader problems in the economy than the need for government cost-cutting at the expense of public sector workers — even though I believe that, too, must be part of the ultimate solution.

In the absence of a more clearly defined agenda, though, I’ve noticed everyone projects onto the Occupy movement their own notion of its agenda — based on what they think it should be.

Over the weekend, there was an organized effort to adopt the Occupy message for Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations. Occupy the Dream, they called it, and asked for politicians to pledge their support for job creation and financial industry regulation.

Sounds good to me.

But I cringe every time I hear someone pinning all the blame on the “1 percent” as if it were some cohesive group that had conspired against the rest of us.

The New York Times published an interesting piece Sunday using census data to profile the people who compose the 1 percent. The newspaper defined that as the top 1 percent of household income, which ranges on the low end from couples bringing in a combined $380,000 a year to the billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. That leaves a wide variation in how people got there and what they believe.

By the way, I have no particular plan on how to become part of the 1 percent. At my current age and position, the odds are increasingly more likely I will finish out my days eating dog food than living on Lake Shore Drive.

Still, I’d like to think that if I ever got the right idea for a best-selling book, there’d be nothing wrong with my getting rich from writing it. (Although from what I can tell, it’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for proposition. Those rich people are crazy.)

Of course, just in case the book thing never works out, I’ll be picking up a lottery ticket on the way home tonight.