One of the themes going around Left Blogovia these days is a sort of mockery of the people who are making more than $250,000 a year, but who don’t think of themselves as rich—and view the prospect of the tax hike that was enacted under Our Previous President and the legislature under the Other Party with a sort of anxiety normally reserved for the middle third of monster movies, after the first disappearances and deaths but before we have whittled our cast down to the named characters. This is part of Blogovia’s push (quite reasonable push, I should add) to have our current legislature force a vote on cutting taxes on only<\/i> the first $250,000 of income, and allowing the aforementioned tax hike to sunset.\n
Three talking points, by the way, for those that don’t follow these things: (A) yes, these tax hikes were legislated under Our Previous President (and his secretive cabal of crooks and incompetents), (2) under the new tax cuts that My Party is pushing, everybody who pays taxes will get a tax cut, and (iii) those who make more than $250,000 a year will have their taxes raised from what they were last year under Our Only President’s plan, but will also<\/i> have their taxes cut, because of the way brackets work. The upshot will be that the break-even point will be something like $270,000—but I’m making that up, and I’m sure there are calculators on-line to get a real number. But the point is that earlier legislation set up these tax hikes, and current legislation is poised to cut taxes for everybody who pays income tax<\/i> from where that legislation had it, while a small number of people will see their tax share rise from what it was last year.\n
The discussion point is about those people. Most of us in our party call them rich people<\/i>; not everybody agrees with that. Particularly, it seems that many if not most people who make between $250,000 and $500,000 a year don’t consider themselves<\/i> rich, and feel that a soak-the-rich policy will mistakenly<\/i> soak them. Left Blogovia does want to soak those people, probably feels that the marginal tax on that money should be closer to 50% than 35%, and thinks that anyone who is making over a quarter of a million dollars a year<\/i> and is complaining should be mocked with all the viciousness and snark that the Blogosphere can spare.\n
The main target seems to be a fellow named Todd Henderson, who is guilty of writing a remarkably smug blog post (reposted on Brad DeLong’s site<\/a> after he took the post down, presumably tired of being vilified) in which he claims that he is not the super-rich. He also made the mistake of misspelling Brad DeLong’s name in a later post. Not really wise, although of course the sort of eror Your Humble Blogger makes all the time. Mr. DeLong writes<\/a> that Mr. Henderson seems to feel that he ought to be able to pay off student loans, contribute to retirement savings vehicles, build equity, drive new cars, live in a big expensive house, send his children to private school, and still have plenty of cash at the end of the month<\/i>. I think this is the really important point. Other people (including Mr. DeLong himself and John Scalzi<\/a> are focused on the interesting issue of why<\/i> Mr. Henderson and many like him do not feel rich, but for understanding what is going on, I think that quote covers it.\n Here it is: If I have a big house, and my kids go to private schools, and I have retirement savings, and I have a new car, and I have someone come in to clean the house every now and then, and I pay somebody to cut the grass every now and then, and if I have a nanny for the kids, and I have a vacation every year (or two), and go out to eat or to concerts or to ball games, then I am a rich man, in political terms. We are not mistakenly targeting people like that with our soak-the-rich policies, we are deliberately targeting people like that. Because they can towel themselves off with thousand-dollar bills, if they are soaked too much.\n In point of fact, YHB and my Best Reader own a smallish house in a goodish neighborhood with a biggish mortgage, mow our own grass but were able to pay someone to powerwash the vinyl siding, go out to eat a couple of times a month, go to concerts or shows three or four times a year, have a vacation twice a year, eat like princes, have decent health insurance (including dental and prescriptions), save a very small amount toward retirement, have a car that is less than five years old (barely), we are (still) paying off our student loans—and we do all that on a household income less than a fifth of Mr. Henderson’s. Depending on how you count our income, as we do get some assistance from family and so on, but still.\n And we are rich. I mean, we’re not rich<\/i>, but we’re rich enough, and we probably aren’t taxed enough to pay for all the things I want my federal, state and local governments to provide. On the other hand, I would have been happy not to have, you know, invaded Iraq. So there’s that. And, frankly, I’m not absolutely convinced that the proposal is the better policy. There’s an argument that we shouldn’t let taxes increase for anyone<\/i> while we’re still slowly digging ourselves out of the recession. And another that we shouldn’t cut taxes for anyone<\/i> while we’re still digging ourselves a bigger deficit every day. But if the argument is that we shouldn’t raise taxes on people like me<\/i>, because I’m so nice<\/i>, well, the problem with that argument is that it’s crap.\n And here’s the thing: we are going to run the government on the backs of the wealthy because that’s where the money is<\/i>. It’s why we swim in the pool and not in the puddle on the deck. And if you are in the top half<\/i> of the richest country in the world, then you are rich, like I am. And if you are in the top quarter<\/i>, then yes, we are looking at you to shoulder more of the burden. And if you are in the top tenth<\/i>, then our soak-the-rich policies are aimed right between your eyes. And if you are in the top twentieth<\/i>, then, yes, even if it really will make your life worse, and maybe even make life worse for your lawn guy, we want to hike your taxes.\n Did you think—did we all think—that we were going to get ourselves out of the recession and balance the budget without hurting anyone?\n Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>, In Which Your Humble Blogger does wonder when ‘millionaire’ started to mean someone who makes a million every year<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19180,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13298\/revisions\/19180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"