Michael Moore Refuses To Answer Net Worth Questions @ Occupy PDX

No, not bad. Hypocritical, maybe.

 

So if someone survives cancer they are a hypocrite for supporting cancer sufferers?

Edit: Never mind, I withdraw this comparison and regret posting in this thread.

 

How can someone who so fully supports the 99% remain in the 1%? There are tons of opportunities to give away all of the income you make after your first $340k.

And why is he denying that he's in the 1%? Either he actually made less than $340k (which is tough to believe, if he's actually worth $50m as has been reported... that's a 0.68% return on net worth) or he believes that Occupiers discount all the 1% or he is self-loathing. Or some combination thereof.

I don't begrudge him making money (even if I begrudge him making stupid movies that I can't stomach) ... but he seems like a hypocritical panderer that would rather make money on the alleged misdeeds and tragedies of others than to come clean on what he is.

Ed O.

 

He's not.

Or maybe the notion that he's pretending not to be part of the 1% isn't accurate.

barfo

 

I can't remember, is it more, or less than $1,000,000,000 that Buffet's company hasn't paid in back taxes? Or is "wanting to be fairly taxed" and "actually paying what you're supposed to be paying" two different things in Rich Liberal Land?

 

First, some comments about Moore. Well done for learning something in Catholic school. I thought his "one for him, one for me" plan was pretty good. However, let's look at that. He didn't give that $1M "for him" to the government to give away as they saw fit. He founded a private charity that donated philanthropically to people and organizations that he wanted to. Sounds a lot like faith-based and other private charities. Not seeing gov't involved, there.

Secondly, let's look at how he disposed of "his" $1M.

Paid off his debts, helped his famiy, helped his parents, helped his family...helped his neighbors rebuild their church in Flint...helped the poor in his community at Thanksgiving, gave to a pet project of his, bought a car, took out a home loan. I'm not seeing a lot of government involvement in those things, either (unless you count that the Marine Corps owns and operates Toys for Tots, but whatever). All great things. All things I will applaud him for publicly. Nothing to do with why I should give more to the government. Nothing to do with why the government shouldn't bounce 1.6T in checks every year. In fact, it looks a lot like what I keep posting about the responsibility of each individual to take care of his family, friends and neighbors, and why local organizations should deal with the bulk of our charitable giving, not the faceless and unaccountable gov't giving checks to faceless and unaccountable people.

And I'm still confused on the 1% thing. Above I'm told it's about people making over $380k (not just in salary, but in investments). Other times I'm told it's based on wealth. Regardless of how he spent his money, this guy made $3M

Though this was a bit ironic. I don't begrudge him for it, but it's funny:

And by the way, this:

...isn't biblical. In fact, it's heretical and antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

It's a parable on the need for salvation, not necessarily a commentary on banking principles, but it's definitely NOT saying that "earth's riches should be divided up in a fair manner." That's from the Book of Michael.

Even his quote from Catholic school: "last shall be first and first last"? It's also from a parable in Matthew. But I don't think it means what Michael thinks it means. I leave it to the reader.

Doesn't seem like anything about government, fairness, or dividing evenly the riches. It talks about how a 1% landowner can do whatever he wants with his money, and was generous in the way he wanted to be generous. He didn't give a bunch of cash to the gov't to dole out to the guys sitting outside doing nothing. He gave his money to people who wanted to work.

 

He is.

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/directors/michael-moore-net-worth/

Michael Moore is a controversial documentary filmmaker with a net worth of $50 million. Moore’s biggest three movies; Bowling For Columbine, Fahrenheit 911 and Capitalism A Love Story have earned over $300 million at the box office.

Fahrenheit 911 raked in $230 million in theaters and another $3 million in DVD sales. After the theaters take their traditional 50% cut, that leaves roughly $130 million. Take away marketing, production and distribution expenses and Moore is conservatively left with $80 million. Moore was able to secure a deal from Miramax which guaranteed him 27% of his film’s net revenues, or roughly $21.6 million. Michael also was entitled to 50% of the profits of Sicko which are estimated to be $17 million.

Moore is the author of several best selling books and received a $1 million advance for “Dude Where’s My Country” plus a generous percentage of the book sales.

 

No, silly, I meant he's not pretending not to be part of the 1%. You obviously didn't click on the link I provided. It's a blog written by Moore entitled "Life among the 1%". Meaning his life.

barfo

 

Also, is he advocating this:

...for all of the 76,000,000 who utilize deductions to not only not pay the full federal, state and city rate, for the privilege of being a citizen...but who don't pay a dime at all?

As we've shown, the "Buffett Plan" of "making the rich pay more" would gain enough revenue to pay 1/1000th of the budget overrun this year, or less than half of what we'd make if we just instituted a "Privilege of Being a Citizen" $20 tax to everyone who files a tax return. I'll put it another way. The Buffett Plan would earn enough to pay about 1/130th of the interest payment on our debt every year. Kanye can scream about raising taxes (btw...is he saying that Kanye thinks the government has a better right to spend Kanye's money on good causes than he does? Because Moore obviously doesn't) but it doesn't do anything to reduce the defecit, stop the figurative check-bouncing, improve our credit rating, etc.

If there's one thing that I agree with the OWS people about (and it's tough, b/c they're all over the place), it's that Congress seems to be listening to special interests (of whatever stripe they come in) rather than legislating what is best for the country. But THEY VOTED FOR THESE PEOPLE!! What do they expect?

Here's an example. 2001, Congress votes to start the Global War on Terror 518-1. 2003, Congress votes to go to war with Iraq: 373-156. Over the next decade, the "Overseas Contingency Operations" line of the budget (basically, the cost of being in two wars) cost roughly 1.4T (a little under the size of this year's deficit). Not once did I see a vote saying "in order to pay for this, we have to tax another $140B a year, which comes out to ~$400 per citizen per year, or $800 per tax return filed per year." Of course people would've been up in arms (no pun intended) about this. But that's the cost of doing business. If the people don't like that, vote out of office the people that voted for the war.
It's like running up a large credit card bill to buy Christmas presents for your family that you hadn't budgeted for, but not getting a temporary job around the holidays in order to pay for it. Irresponsible. Those people (D's and R's and I's) have to go. As does the thinking that goes along with why they thought they could get away with it.
And that's just the war. You can say the same thing about Medicare (>$700B per year overrun), Social Security as it goes cash-negative, "stimulus" spending, unemployment extensions, etc.

 

You can easily find recent YouTube videos of him denying he is in the top 1% or that he's worth $millions. I guess that makes him a big fat liar.

 

You'd have to provide a link for that, as I'm not sufficiently interested to search for it.

barfo