I’m not the President, but I do want to respond to your letter to him and, perhaps more importantly, to your interview with the New York Times. I was struck by this comment:
“I came from nothing,” he said, explaining how he grew up in the Bronx and went to P.S. 75. “I have lived the American Dream.”
First, you’re 68 years old. That means you were probably born in 1943. You went to a public college (Hunter) with a federal loan (which came into being in 1958). A year’s tuition was probably under $500 ($3,700 in today’s dollars) … today, Hunter College tuition is about $8,000 a year (pdf).
You worked for Xerox before joining Goldman Sachs (25 years, rising to become CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management). Now you run your own hedge fund (a 20 year venture), have a net worth of $1.8 billion and have been fighting the IRS over $5 million in taxes.
But federal law specifically prohibits a tax deduction for such non-publicly traded investments to one’s own private foundation. The bar had been enacted to stop tycoons from making gifts with values inflated for tax purposes. Cooperman would have no tax problem if he had made the gift to, say, any of the nonprofits on the Forbes list of the 200 largest U.S. charities.
Folks who were born in 1943 — well, white males, anyway — could expect the type of cradle-to-grave employment you experienced with Goldman. Times are different today. In fact, they started changing less than two decades after you were born. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (pdf), “The average person born in the latter years of the baby boom held 11 jobs from age 18 to age 44.” The report continues: “men with a bachelor’s degree or more education held 11.0 jobs.” Your public record suggests you held two jobs during that age bracket. So it’s not the education level that’s at work here, it’s society.
Oh. And what about the unemployment rate? Assuming four years of undergrad and two for your master’s (Columbia University, Ivy League schools aren’t “nothing”), you might have entered the job market in 1968. The unemployment rate was 3.4% in December 1968. According to Gallup, almost 1-in-5 Americans are underemployed today and almost 1-in-10 are unemployed; the unemployment number skyrockets for those under age 30. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for college graduates aged 20-24-year was 12.1% in June.
You see, Mr. Cooperman, the world we live in today looks nothing like the one you entered as an enterprising young man. Your rant to the President included the claim that your story is not “unique” because you know a lot of people “similarly situated.” This is a fallacy, a common one, but a fallacy none-the-less.
The fact is that we are living in an era of unprecedented inequality. Rather than criticize the President for pointing it out — and yes, the finger goes straight to Wall Street as it was the center of our current economic mess — why not speak out with equal vigor with suggestions for trimming that gap… perhaps back to the level it was when you were a young whippersnapper. That would, dear sir, mean that the upper 0.1% would need lose HALF of what they have today.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com