Max Abelson has a fantastic column today from simply asking prominent members of the 1% about their embattled status. " data-share-img="" data-share="twitter,facebook,linkedin,reddit,google,mail" data-share-count="false">

Max Abelson has a fantastic column today from simply asking prominent members of the 1% about their embattled status. There’s Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, who characterizes any potential critic of his wealth by asking the timeless question “who gives a crap about some imbecile?”. There’s BB&T‘s John A. Allison IV, who says that any rule requiring public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEO and their median employee would constitute “an attack on the very productive”. And then there’s Steve Schwarzman, displaying his legendary deftness of touch in a TV interview:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax. “You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64.

This isn’t an “I see what you did there” moment so much as it’s a brazen decision to go on the attack against “the 47%”: Americans who earn so little money that they don’t pay federal income tax. (Of course, they still have “skin in the game”: they still pay sales tax and payroll taxes and local taxes.) 61% of these families — let’s call them the 29% — are earning less than $20,000 per year.

Let’s say that Schwarzman has been working for 40 years and is now worth $6 billion: that works out at $20,000 an hour, every hour of every day, even when he was sleeping, since the day he started working.

But never mind the fact that Schwarzman is earning more per hour than the people he’s criticizing make in a year. There are other billionaires just itching to weigh in. Like Paychex founder Tom Golisano:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star.

Remember that, people. If you start agitating to reduce inequality, there might be vomiting in the neighborhood of Monica Seles. And we wouldn’t want that.

And then — just for comic relief — there’s Peter Schiff, who probably needs to bone up a bit on his medieval history:

Schiff, 48, disclosed assets of at least $64.7 million before losing the 2010 Republican primary for a Connecticut U.S. Senate seat, according to filings. He’s wealthier now, even though his taxes are “more than a medieval lord would have taken from a serf,” he said.

Abelson plays all of this for laughs, which is reasonable enough, given his Wall Street audience. But out there in real America, it isn’t funny, it’s tragic. And so it’s worth hearing from a multi-millionaire who can explain the class dynamics of America without trying to defend the indefensible. Here’s Bruce Springsteen, in his introduction to a new book by Dale Maharidge and Michael S. Williamson:

It is the story of the deconstruction of the American dream, piece by piece, literally steel beam by steel beam, broken up and shipped out south, east and points unknown, told in the voices of those who’ve lived it. Here is the cost, in blood, treasure and spirit, that the post-industrialization of the United States has levied on its most loyal and forgotten citizens, the men and women who built the buildings we live in, laid the highways we drive on, made things and asked for nothing in return but a good day’s work and a decent living. It tells of the political failure of our representatives to stem this tide (when not outright abetting it), of their failure to steer our economy in a direction that might serve the majority of hard-working American citizens and of their allowing of an entire social system to be hijacked into the service of the elite. The stories allow you to feel the pounding destruction of purpose, identity and meaning in American life, sucked out by a plutocracy determined to eke out its last drops of tribute, no matter what the human cost.

A lot of the decline of industrial America was probably inevitable — although not all of it. But rather than sitting on their billions and gloating about their fat-cat status (I’m looking at you, Ken Langone), it surely behooves America’s plutocrats to remember the plight of people who actually produce stuff. I’d love to know how John A. Allison IV measures his own personal productivity and determines that it’s extremely high. Because, speaking as someone who earns a very healthy salary myself, I have no idea where I’d even start on such a quest. I could measure words written per day, I suppose, but how much is a word worth?

The fact is that the ultra-rich really aren’t productive, and instead mostly collect rents from people who are. This is what capital always does, of course: it buys labor (some people call that “job creation”, even if the jobs being created are mostly in China), and then extracts dividends from it.

So let’s not kid ourselves that the men with the billions (or, for that matter, the 22-year-old Monaco residents with $88 million pied-à-terre apartments in New York City) are in any way hard done by. Not when there’s so much real hardship in America.