The Poor, Poor Rich According To the Wall Street Journal
The Onion couldn't top this. Whether it's the sad faces of all these put-upon dejected rich people, or the elderly minority couple who is depressed despite not paying extra taxes (or was that the point?), or the distressed single Asian lady making $230,000 who might not be able to buy that extra designer pantsuit this year, or the "single mother" making $260,000 whose kids presumably have a deadbeat, indigent dad just like any other poor family, or that struggling family of six making $650,000 including $180,000 of pure passive income and wondering how to make ends meet, mockery is almost superfluous. The thing mocks itself. That $650,000 family in particular is bizarre to the point of incredulity: those people could literally stop working entirely, live extremely well on $180,000 while doing nothing but watching television all day and staying home with their kids, and leave their high-salary jobs with their oh-so-onerous tax requirements to people who actually appreciate them.
Beyond mockery, though, that the Wall Street Journal would even dare publish such a thing without irony is indicative of the reality that the wealthy don't live in the same country as the rest of us. Their experience of life, and therefore of public policy, is on an entirely different plane. These are people who take tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of yearly passive investment income for granted and think they earned that money, deserving to pay very low taxes on it. They're people who see a single individual making $230,000 as struggling to get by, and severely put upon by the loss of a couple thousand dollars to help pay for decrepit infrastructure and basic healthcare for the indigent.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-poor-poor-rich-of-wall-street.html
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The only ones not paying more taxes are the ones who don't work.
Ergo, the people who "contribute to society" are being "punished for their success," while the "slouchers get a free ride."
Edit: So I agree, I don't think it's by accident the ones in the illustration are African-Americans.
So they deserve all that money!
- I've found - is like a pinpoint laser, cutting through the bullshit muck and fog of obfuscating flowery language that does nothing but distract and hide. That sentence is one such. 
I don't think minimum wage needs to be raised to $260,000 a year to be considered a decent bottom wage, though.
250,000 then, okay. 
In 1955 there were 24 income tax brackets. Adjusting for inflation:
16 brackets affected incomes above the equivalent of $250,000;
11 of those affected incomes above the equivalent of $500,000;
The top bracket kicked in on incomes over the equivalent of $3.3 million.
And that's just talking about where one income level was treated differently than another, without even mentioning what the rates were on those brackets.
Yet somehow we still had rich people, and people who became rich.
All the (fictional) people in the WJS graphic are affluent and doing very well, even if they aren't among the super-rich (though I'd argue the $650K family with $180K investment income certainly qualifies for the non-super version of "rich"
. Be that as it may, it definitely misleads readers by only using examples from the highest (non-super-rich) end of the income spectrum, and using representations that imply generally more modest means than the specified incomes.
Tiger had to scratch out $100 mil to get rid of her
