it seemed that the pronounced disparity between the paltry tax revenues being sent from this town and the level of moral neglect reportedly attained by the average self-indulgent citizen of yami had been troubling to analysts from the tax bureau , who were accustomed only to hearing reports of this level of moral degradation among those who occupied the top 1 % of the highest tax brackets in the republic ( these top echelons generally consisted of inheritors of soul-destroying amounts of wealth , who still managed to remain far less reprehensible than their nouveau riche yamian counterparts , inasmuch as these remnants of the old aristocracy were still pressured to conform to the rigid , stodgy molds fashioned for them by the firm surfaces of their surroundingsthose hard-stuffed cushions which pressed up against and made depressions in their buttocks , those clothes and costumes they wore which required corsets and bound feet and the ability to subsist by respiring shallowly [ thereby compromising the amount of oxygen which reached the brain : the poor fellows !