One of the things I love about conservatives and our libertarians friends is the malleability of definitions. When you state that 250k is well off and the tax cuts for those making more than that will not cripple them, they scream and wail about how how 250k isn’t rich and the cost of living in the NYC area and on and on. We’ve all heard variations on the argument. For a refresher, here are our Fox bots driving the point home:
So- 250k isn’t rich, according to these guys. Yet, without missing a beat, the same folks can turn around and flip out over public employees making significantly less than that. Here’s the Business Insider, which exists solely to fluff Wall Street insiders and frat boy traders, trying to create another Brooks Brothers riot over those fat cat NY Transit workers:
Last night the MTA said a fare hike by January is a near certainty. This will be the third fare hike since 2008. New Yorkers will be most afflicted by the increase of the unlimited monthly pass from $89 to $104. Meanwhile, the MTA continues to pass major MTA service cuts.
But what’s really appalling is how much transit workers get paid.
We’re republishing data from SeeThroughNY showing that 8,074 MTA employees earned $100,000 last year. Fifty MTA employees earned more than $200,000 last year. And salaries are rising.
The first “fat cat” they profile is some LIRR conducter making 100k a year. And this isn’t an abnormality- this kind of stuff is pushed in wingnut and glibertarian circles all the time. Here’s glibertarian extraordinaire Matt Welch complaining about custodians making 50k a year in California.
There’s a class war on, alright. And the assholes that have the money are the ones waging it.
*** Update ***
In fairness, it may just be that I’ve not read enough Ayn Rand to understand how making 250k a year in NYC makes one “not rich” but making 100k a year makes someone a fat cat, but I do have an idea. Let’s just pay all public employees 250k a year, and then they magically will become one of Freedom Fonzarelli’s “producers”:
Because, as we all know, when fighting for tax cuts for Paris Hilton, it is important to remember that what makes you a producer is how much you make, not how much you actually produce.
cleek
TPM makes a good point: even if the cuts are continued only for the sub-$250,000 brackets, everyone gets a cut, even the rich, because that’s how marginal rates work.
the rich wouldn’t get a cut on their $250,000+ dollars, but they would get the exact same cut everyone else gets on their 0-$249,999 dollars.
not that this will make a difference to fuckwits like Ben Nelson and Lieberminge.
Maude
They are also saying that you have to give the rich their rightful tax cuts because they create jobs. Ronnie Reagan is alive and well.
If someone is blue collar, they should be grateful that the wealthy let them work.
These iditos belong with their heads stuck in porta potties.
Brachiator
Shouldn’t pundits be forced to reveal their incomes before they start pontificating about how $250,000 a year really isn’t “rich?”
different church-lady
Thanks John, I had never made that connection before.
Mr Furious
“Yeah! Train conductors should be making minimum wage! All they do is sit on their ass and hold a throttle!”
Never mind that they are responsible for hundreds of lives at any given time…I want the guy driving my train to be a rookie making $32K instead of a seasoned vet—a Captain Sully of the rails—because paying anything more is a waste of money.
ruemara
from the person who hasn’t seen 20k in net earnings since 1999; yes.
May they die a fucking tragic, humiliating death and their name be synonymous with evil for a century.
Yes, I’m bitter.
Working on the next round of ads, wherein, I hope to make some concise points about this shit.
EFroh
Seriously, I will never get the hatred glibertarians have for government and “blue-collar” workers. It’s like they think these jobs are easy or don’t require training.
R-Jud
@EFroh:
That’s exactly what they think. Especially about teachers. There’s this idea floating around out there that teaching kids, especially at the primary level, is just telling them what you learned when you were their age.
Which, you know, it’s not.
ts
jesus fucking christ. I make app. 90k a year and I live the most expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn. I AM NOT HURTING.
Villago Delenda Est
Faux Nooze? Beyond the nightmares of George Orwell, they are.
Omnes Omnibus
Is it hereditary wealth, generational money, trust fund rich? No. Is it comfortable life, nice home, good schools rich? Yes. I saw something a couple weeks ago that discussed how much money people need before they consider themselves rich, but I can’t find the link to it now. The end result was that, if one has a net worth of $10 million, one starts to feel safely rich. By that, they mean that the people at that level of wealth have enough money that they need never work if they don’t want to, can afford a wealthy lifestyle, and still will be able to leave a shit load of money to their kids. Below that level, all three of the conditions are not met. The article used the term comfortably affluent for those people. If I find it, I will post the link.
El Cid
The viewpoint which helped toss Gingrich Republican Fred Heineman from having won the seat formerly held by Democrat David Price in the 1994 Republican victory, who then gained it back in 1996:
However, bad health hurt Heineman’s electoral situation as well.
Technically you would tend to lump people making $750,000 as the upper middle class if your definition of rich would be the much richer capitalist class (i.e., the decamillionaire on-up CEOs and inherited wealth and investor class), but in ordinary parlance that’s utterly ridiculous and offensive.
Still, it’s who the GOP feels and is pained for.
Maude
OT
Obama is making an interim appointment of Elizabeth Warren.
Okay, let’s hear the complaints starting in 5..4..3..
jeff
$250K in NYC is very rich; $100K in NYC is quite well-off.
Violet
@R-Jud:
This is true. I used to be a teacher. I had people ask me why I was a teacher. “You’re so smart,” they’d say, “Why do you want to be a teacher?” This happened more than once. The questioners were educated people themselves. I guess they were happy with dumb people teaching their kids.
Many people think they know what teaching is and how to do it. Heck, anyone who has graduated from high school has observed teachers for twelve years. You watch anyone do anything for twelve years, day after day, it’s not a huge leap to think you know how to do it yourself. Until you try to do it yourself and then you see how hard it is to do.
jeffreyw
Thread needs more burrito.
Steve
@Maude: Link? Not seeing news of this anywhere.
Jamie
Hey you can barely afford to live in Manhattan on $250K/year. Do you even know what it costs to put your kids through private school these days.;-)
ruemara
In NY, I made about 27k in 1995 and my mate made about 18k. We had an awesome 2 bedroom near Columbia and felt like kings. Something tells me that anyone making these arguments about $250k=not rich, has never, ever in their life had the slightest thought about living on a budget, making sure bills are paid first and the simple joys of mostly home cooking with a luxurious day at a Barnes & Nobles bookstore reading café.
binzinerator
The class war has been doing a ‘surge’ since the early 1980’s when supply-side economics began achieving its real goal: a massive wealth transfer to the wealthy. At least it was obvious to me by then.
This is why these assholes hate the New Deal so much. It was FDR’s means of transferring wealth to the middle class, and it was successful at it. If the wealth is going to be diverted to the rich the New Deal must be destroyed, dismantled or discredited.
When the government transfers wealth to people who are not rich, these rich assholes and their lackeys deride it as Soci-alism. When the wealth goes to the wealthy they insist it is their due by some natural law as ‘producers’. Which essentially means it’s theirs because they are wealthy.
They call it a class war only when we fight back.
Carol
100,000 in NYC, the most expensive city in the US, is a solid middle class wage. Why pay it? Maybe so that the conductors, cops, whatever, stay on the job and accumulate experience that comes into play when something comes up that needs judgement. Maybe so they can afford to stay in the city they serve and be available 24/7 in the worst weather at a moment’s notice instead of commuting from some far suburb.
Maybe so that their salaries can go back into the city’s economy and help keep up the tax structure.
We’ve been getting a lot of flack over civil service salaries. The mail gets delivered, the taxes processed regardless of who’s President. The cops do their work regardless of who’s Mayor. Good salaries and civil service stability makes that happen. People can stay out of situations where there is a potential conflict of interest when they don’t have to work a second job to make ends meet.
Jamie
and if you fight back in a class war that means you’re a communist.
binzinerator
@Maude:
Fixed, for what in all that is just and righteous should happen.
QDC
I’m on board with your larger point, and those salary numbers seem generous, but not crazy to me. (50 managers of a large enterprise making 200k seems about right, 100k plus a pension for a conductor is pretty good money, but hardly scandalous.)
But it’s worth pointing out that LIRR employees were collectively involved in some scandalous practices related to compensation fairly recently, so they might not be the first public employees I’d rush to defend, to wit:
And this:
sstarr
Wages have been held below inflation for all blue collar workers, benefits have been slashed for everyone, and non-public employee unions have been decimated. But those public employees continue to get raises and benefits! It’s infuriating! They must also have their livelihoods destroyed so the Galtian super-men can continue to be properly rewarded for their jobs in management, CDO trading, marketing and corporate law. You wouldn’t want to tax corporate lawyers, that might stifle innovation!
El Cid
@binzinerator: A number of the richest capitalists saw that a nation without a degree of healthy economic participation and benefits for the majority would turn dangerously unstable. Many of the New Deal programs were actually formulated by think tanks supported by the super-rich, particularly those whose fortunes were in part based in international trade, and rabidly opposed as Communist by capitalists more restricted to national markets.
Almost none of the super-rich capitalist class today (a couple of exceptions, but very few and who involve themselves in the most limited of fashions) seem to have this long term dedication to national stability and development.
beltane
@EFroh: It’s because they are spoiled, lazy-assed rich kids who have never had to work for a damn thing in their useless, privileged lives. If McMegan, for example, had to wait tables and was stiffed by the customers for her incompetence, she’d sing another tune in a hurry.
The only thing any of these gliberatrians have done to deserve their good fortune is to slither out of a rich woman’s hoo-ha.
MJ
Similar to the income issue, I’ve always been confused by the use of “small business” in political arguments. When a candidate says they support small business owners the image of a small corner store owner springs to mind. But depending on the definition, “small business” could be a car dealership where the owner makes $10million a year. I hate that.
Zifnab
This is it. This is truly the last straw. Any minute now, countless hordes of producers are totally going to Go Galt. It’s totally going to happen. The rich can no longer be placated against travesties of injustice. And when all the rich folks are gone, boy are you all going to be sorry.
Rock
I’ve liked a lot of what ED Kain has posted here (you see where this going, right?), but the one thing that truly irked me was his posting about CA prison guards making $100K. You know without me saying that he was “annoyed” by that amount. Aside from making this pronouncement based simply on his feeling these jobs shouldn’t pay much, he also was referencing a newspaper story that pointed out guards were making 100 large because they were working so much overtime.
There is a conventional wisdom that some jobs (prison guard, teacher, really any job funded by tax dollars…) should be low paying. No one ever says why though. And, of course, the people who feel these jobs should be low paying don’t even really know what the job entails.
I’m amazed that in the days when Wall Street traders make $1M a year working 3 hours a day, people get most pissed off about grade school teachers wanting things like a 5 percent raise when their avg salary is well below $80K a year…
There’s been a definite uptick in media stories about how plush government employees benefits and compensation are in the state where I live. It’s true, there is a class war going on….
Violet
@Jamie:
Then call me a communist. And bring on the pitchforks.
beltane
@Jamie: Nothing would terrify these people more than the formation of a communist movement that viciously attacked the undeserving rich. Unlike Islamophobia, a genuine red scare would make the glibertarians piss their pants and cry for their mommies.
El Cid
By the way, Reuters addresses this debate.
Comrade Dread
Actually, 250k might not be rich, if you account for debt to wealth ratios.
These people are likely to have expensive mortgages, car payments, and in the case of small business owners various degrees of business debt.
Of course, this argument rarely ever holds over for ‘conservatives’ on other economic matters for people who are underwater on their mortgages, suffering from climbing medical bills, or struggling under fees and usury interest rates from banks.
In the cases of these people, it’s ‘they should have known better’ or “their debts are their responsibility.’
In short, Republicans can go pound sand.
Silver
To be fair, if you were Nick Gillespie, you’d probably have a hefty mouthwash bill. How else would you get the taste of all that Koch semen out of your mouth? That could easy reach into the six figure range per year…
Anyone remember the horror film about the 3 people sewn together ass to mouth? The libertarian foot soldiers are the middle segment, and they are ecstatic that they only have to swallow the shit of one person.
Jager
I have a client (2 expansive homes, drives a Bentley GT, etc) obsessed with how the little people are fucking him, somehow the suckers who work for him in the 25-35k a year brackets are lazy, shiftless, stupid, have no ambition and all they do is cost him money everyday. As much as he dislikes those folks, the ones that really get under his skin are the part-time employees who make around 10 bucks an hour. I’ve been around business for years and this attitude is new, it started showing up 10-12 years ago, earlier, there was bitching about employee costs but it was never personal like it is now. Then again, this prick owes me for the last two months work and my expenses, I’m sure he is bitching about me to his pals in the “club”!
jrg
I REALLY hope they start making this argument more often. I’m sure it will go over well… “You know CEOs, those guys on Wall St. that have been scamming you for years, and the idiot children of the rich? They’re producers. You clerks, teachers, engineers, police, construction workers, accountants, etc, etc… You people don’t do shit.”
vtr
If I made 250G and had to pay 45-50% on it, I would be left with a mere 125-140G a year to spend. Though this will never happen to me, I think if it did, I could be satisfied with the circumstance. Can someone please tell how this would make me unhappy?
beltane
@ruemara: I lived in Brooklyn Heights on less than $40,000 a year and I lived pretty damn well. If someone can’t get by on $250,000, maybe it’s because they are profligate with their spending which would be a problem no matter how much they make.
The private school argument is one that really irks me. If your child is smart and hard working, the NYC public schools are quite excellent. I have no sympathy for people who shell out tens of thousands of dollars to make sure their children only associate with the “right” sort of people.
fasteddie9318
If you’re rich, it stands to reason that you only want the right sort of people to be rich, otherwise it devalues the whole notion of being rich and you might as well sell all your stuff to buy crack and set up camp under a bridge somewhere. When Fonzie sees Morlocks pretending to be Eloi, he can’t help but blurt out his opposition to such an obscenity, even if to the other Morlocks it seems like Fonzie is being, charitably, a disingenuous piece of shit. If you’re not one of the proper rich then you simply lack the cranial capacity to comprehend the level on which what Fonzie is saying makes total sense.
El Cid
Also, the classic sociological definition of upper class has been based on (of course) empirically fuzzy boundaries, but hazily focuses on those whose primary source of income / wealth is from returns on investments or inherited wealth, whereas the non-upper classes (from working to middle classes) earn some sort of salary or wages and who are not among the very highest fractions of percentages of income earners or wealth holders.
Classic Marxist definitions tend to suggest much more defined boundaries.
Zifnab
@beltane:
In all fairness, the woman who gives birth to the rich guy is usually the first wife who was around when times were tough. Not the second or third trophy wife, who was picked up from a high end temp agency peddling college aged working women as corporate eye candy.
I’m just saying, don’t blame the rich woman. They are rarely at the top of the crazy people pyramid.
pablo
The GOP Angle, do they mean Mel Brooks “Producers”?
It should be a no brainer!
I’ll be here till Thursday…two shows nightly!
Maude
@binzinerator:
How about pottie then pike?
Omnes Omnibus
@Jager: Ah yes, the view that employees are liabilities, not assets, and certainly not people with needs and desires that are similar to, in kind, if not degree, those of the owner/CEO/Master of the Universe. Lovely people.
cat48
They can have my tax cut on our household’s income which is well under $100k. The new Poverty numbers are out tomorrow and1 in 7 in the US are living in poverty. This whole argument is misguided and leaves me very depressed.
Maude
@Steve:
I heard it on the radio before 6 this morning. Not sure which station. I think there will be an announcement and then the media will pick it up.
I thought it was Bloomberg, but I could be wrong.
Bob L
Well for what is worth my sister and her husband make somewhere around $250K and they are not rich in the sense they could retire today and live the lifestyle they are accustom to. On the other hand a tax increase is hardly going to crimp their style.
tbogg
@EFroh:
Because they see “civil service” as synonymous with “civil rights” and everyone knows that civil service workers are shiftless minorities (looters) who are too lazy to work in the “real world” with their white betters (producers) and when they do, they get promoted over deserving white guys who have no power in the world.
You know what is whiter than a Tea Party? A Reason staff meeting….
Carol
@Bob L: True, not the lifestyle they are accustomed to, but if they have savings and some investments, they don’t have to scurry out and get another job right away, and there’s a lot to cut back before it begins to cramp their style.
El Cid
@Jager: Several times I’ve worked among Latin American elites outside their nations of origins (people with international businesses, several homes, lavish vacations and parties, etc.), and consistently they complain in the most vicious and frequently racist forms about the lower class people who work for them (maids, custodians, groundskeepers) and their greed, constantly asking for more money or loans and why can’t they appreciate what they do have, like their hovels in the mountains or barrios, which typically have no sanitation services and high infant mortality rates and dangerous water supplies etc., and how this or that leader or movement is trying to put in power these dirty Indian or black or mixed race beasts. It’s absolutely disgusting and so often they act as the oppressed classes.
Bob L
@Jager: You should tell your client his part time works are worth every penny he pays. I mean gee, that’s a surprise, pay people shitty money and get shitty work.
Beauzeaux
@Maude:
“their heads stuck in porta potties”
My first read of this was “their heads stuck in polo ponies” then I realized you’d never be so cruel to horses.
NonyNony
@vtr:
But that isn’t how it works anyway. If you made 250K you would pay through the lower tax rates first and you wouldn’t pay a dime of the 50% tax rates because that’s only on income that exceeds 250K.
Say there were only 3 tax rates – 15% on income up to 50K, 33% on income up to 250K and 50% on income over 250K. You’d only pay the 15% on the first 50K (7,500), the 33% on income between 50K and 250K (66,000) and nothing on income over 250K (cause you don’t make that much). So you’d pay 73,500 in taxes and have around 176K in income. And that’s only if we had a tax system that had no exemptions and deductions built into it – in reality your take home is going to be even more than that because you’re going to get those exemptions and deductions.
When we’re talking about the tax on the largest bracket, we’re only talking about the tax that they make on money in that bracket. If there’s a 50% tax on income over 250K then for every 1,000 you make over 250K you take home 500 of it. But income you make less than the 250K mark is taxed at the lower rate. That’s the magic of a progressive income tax.
fasteddie9318
@Bob L:
No disrespect to your sister and her husband, but when did that become the definition of “rich”? If someone decides to retire mid-career before they’ve paid off their house and put significant money aside for retirement, they damn well ought to expect not to be able to “live the lifestyle they are accustom to.”
Brachiator
@El Cid:
This is good stuff. But also, as I mentioned in another post, the Democrats need to take a page from Ross Perot’s book and use simple graphs and charts to make their damned points.
From an old FactCheck entry:
Does anyone in his or her right mind think that the middle class comprises only 2% of the population?
Put it on a goddam piece of paper and flash it at the White House Press Briefing: 2% Modest Tax hike. 98% Tax Breaks.
A little more detail on the over $250K group:
BudP
GOP plan: Tax cuts for Trump, Wage cuts for You
williamc
@beltane:
I need a like button so I don’t have to comment.
Every time I meet a libertarian and have any kind of conversation with them, this is how they got to be a libertarian. They are rich, lazy, spoiled potheads who think that everyone besides them is a leech, though they have no discernible skills, and are usually amongst the worst workers with the worst people skills that I’ve ever met. They think they are Gaultian supermen (that fucking book sucks as a fictional narrative!), and all they’ve ever really produced is a doctor’s bill to remove some rich broad’s post-pregnancy stretch marks.
New Yorker
Don’t get me started on the ridiculous MTA budget issues. Given how much prices have risen and service has been cut, it would be hard for me to resist the urge to kick the crap out of the first MTA executive I met on the street.
As for the $250k earners, make ’em go back to the Roosevelt-era tax brackets.
dave
Well, as long as they are already screaming about a 3% increase in tax rate we should also remove the ceiling on social security and take em for that 8.2%. Maybe their heads will explode and we won’t have to listen to them any more.
Sentient Puddle
It was pointed out before, but worth pointing out again: Even in New York City, $250,000 is rich.
Lurking Canadian
I think private school is a huge part of this issue. By definition, “rich” people send their kids to private school. If you have two kids in a $30000/yr private school, that is going to consume almost all of the top $100000 of your gross household income. If you started at $250K, now you’re living on $150K, and you’re “middle class”.
That you are still in the top few percent of wage earners even after you cut out the top third to send your kids to Privileged Prep is a small consolation. You aren’t going to feel “rich” when your kids get invited to their classmate’s Aspen ski lodge for Christmas vacation. (Cue McArdle’s griping about how hard it is to have rich friends.)
I have little sympathy for this point of view, but I think it is a big part of this “we’re not rich” stuff.
El Cid
@NonyNony: Remember, there are no such things as marginal tax rates. I’ve always heard from my conservative friends that since there was once a 90% tax rate on the rich (they never knew about the loopholes that made that laughably hypothetical) it meant that once you made $X, the government would swoop in and take 90% of your money. You know, like a dangerous threshold being violated.
carol h
My husband is a research scientist at a public university and I work in a lab. We earn slightly under $250,000 pre tax and live in a low cost of living state. We haven’t always earned this much and probably will not for very much longer since we are both paid by soft money and grants get harder to get every year.
However, we know how lucky we are. We pay a lot in taxes because we have a small mortgage and our kids are gone but we have plenty left at the end of the month. We have a daughter just out of college and a married son just out of the Army and help support all of them. All three are working buth although my daughter and DIL both have college degrees all of them make between $10-13/hour but are glad to have jobs in this economy. We paid for out daughter’s health insurance until this month (thanks, Obama!). We pay for cell phones, car registration, car insurance, and the extras their salaries don’t cover.
We also send money to my 87 year old father who has alzheimer’s and his 76 year old wife. She is his care giver but will probably not be able to do it much longer and we know we will have nursing home bills.
We are fortunate, we are lucky, are glad to pay our share and would pay more if asked.
Bob L
@fasteddie9318:
Well the discussion is over is 250K “rich” or not, at lest for the tax code. 250K certainly isn’t the magic number were you can McCain it and own more houses than you can remember. On the other hand it is well off enough that they are not staggering under the tax burden and need cuts (frankly, I would doubt if they would notice)
For the record they are both programmers and hard core Democrats.
New Yorker
@ts:
Seriously. I was living very well on less than $50k a year in a nice part of Brooklyn (Greenpoint) before I went to business school (I’m currently making better money as a consultant, but it’s not a permanent job, so it’s hard to compare apples-to-apples).
I always notice that when the NY Times profiles these poor, suffering families who are barely getting by on $250k a year, the photos inevitably show the Mercedes-Benz in the driveway and the in-ground pool in the backyard. They ain’t exactly living in a rat-infested tenement in the Bronx….
Dothax
Actual tax data, from actual returns. [Not theory and musings about tax rates]
Here are the minimum AGI from IRS data to fall into different buckets for 2007
Top 0.1% $2,155,365 minimum
Top 1% $410,096 minimum
Top 5% $160,041 minimum
Top 10% $113,018 minimum
And here are the tax rates ..
Bucket avg rate AGI floor
Top 0.1% 21.46 (2.155 mil +)
Top 1% 22.45 (0.419 mil +
Top 5% 20.53 (0.160 mil +)
Top 10% 18.79 (0.133 mil+)
There is an actual propaganda behind this “250K is rich” and “top 1% should be taxed”. It is that tax rates max out at incomes of ~400K and then fall, if you earn into the millions.
This raising taxes on 250K+ is propaganda pure and simple. It passes on the tax burden mostly to older double income families in high cost of living areas. Sure the isolated taxpayer in Podunk might make 250K and could very well be rich. But in reality, it is the multimillionaire incomes hiding under the skirt of the older workers and professionals
Now add the payroll tax to this 22% , and it is much more regressive. Upto about 212K income (dual income, fica cap). The Top 0.1% pays even less, because of fica cap
So this 250K earner is paying 22.5 + 8(FICA) + 9 (CA State income) = 39%. Add sales tax and property tax and it comes close to 50%.
Show me a millionaire that pays 39% in taxes. Show me one that pays 35%. They won’t because it is all taxed at preferred rates of investment income. They have all ways to skip taxes.
This is more of taxing wages, and letting plutocrats alone. The wage earners – like crabs in a bucket – are fighting tooth and nail while the plutocrats laugh.
Understand that – raising tax rates on 250K does not raise taxes on millionaires. You think it would, but it does not. It disproportionately taxes older workers and professionals. It only applies to **wages and ordinary income**. Most of the millionaires get investment income. Ever heard of carried interest tax at 15% on hedge fund billionaires? You think you are raising that by this “tax everybody above 250K” move?
You can raise tax rates all you want, but the rate for these plutocrats don’t budge. All you end up is taxing wage earners more – those in that range of 250-400K
For some real proposals read this
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/08/16/100816ta_talk_surowiecki
And then wonder why that does not happen.
The link for the tax data cited in this post is at . It also has tax rates by income type – ordinary, investment etc. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/07in05tr.xls
To see graphically in one view, see this picture of income distribution http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/incomedistribution.png
Those in the lower brackets are overtaxed. Especially if you add in state and sales taxes. The tax burden needs to shift up. And there is certainly a section of the populace paying well below their share. I don’t think that is the families earning 250k ~ 400K – and I cite that with actual tax data.
What is required is to raise taxes on the millionaires much more – and this policy of raising taxes on 250K is NOT getting anywhere close to that.
vtr
@NonyNony: So I’d be even happier than I ever dreamed! Where do I sign up for this? And what the F%#$ and Republicans whining about?
Tax Analyst
@dave:
Dave, it’s actually 6.2%, but otherwise I fully agree on your point.
Boy, I can hear the whining now, though. “Why should I subsidize the retirement of all those people?”
Gravenstone
@Maude:
We keep seeing this argument time and again. I know you’re using it sarcastically, but for those who mean (or claim to mean) it seriously, please answer this.
The “rich” have had benefit of the “Bush Tax Cuts” for 10 years now. Where are all the fucking jobs they’re supposed to have created over that period of time, and why should we believe they’d act in good faith tomorrow if the cuts were extended?
Omnes Omnibus
Didn’t Fitzgerald have a line about a character coming from the poorest house on the richest street of his town? I think rich is a comparative term, and, if your yardstick is I-bankers, $250K is not rich; if, however, your yardstick is the general population, then $250K is quite rich.
Mike
It’s funny, because there’s a class of government employee who I hear are paid around $165,000 / year, with 2 month long paid vacations, generous health care and pension packages. They only only work 3 days a week the rest of the year, and split their free time between golfing, tanning and checking the countertops of teachers and firefighters.
I wonder what would happen if someone suggested we cut the public expedetures on these chaps?
NonyNony
@El Cid:
But these people eventually grew up, started paying taxes for themselves, and figured out that that isn’t how it works at all, right?
Right?
Sigh. Yeah, I know.
I don’t know how laughably hypothetical the 90% rate actually was back under Eisenhower and FDR though. Both of them had wars to fight, and back then presidents took war funding seriously. By Reagan, though, the 50% rate on the top bracket was definitely a joke.
Tsulagi
Seems in Tea Party land, they prefer a different tag. In a deep, sandbox think tank worthy post, TP Commander EE says of them: “They are the job creators.”
Has almost a religious kind of vibe, doesn’t it? “And on the fourth day the Goldman Sachs bonus god created a nanny. And saw that she was good.”
zzyzx
@El Cid:
It’s the same reason why parents are terrified about vaccine side effects. The cure has worked so well that the terror of what it was trying to stop has faded.
Beauzeaux
My husband and I both worked for the MTA in the eighties. He was a Road Car Inspector and made $14.50 an hour. His job was to answer calls for stalled trains on the road. His station was Atlantic & Flatbush where he waited in a glass enclosed booth between the tracks where it was 95+ degrees even at midnight. In the winter it was cold but you could put on more clothes.
When he got a call he had to proceed to the stalled train and figure out how to move it. He had to deal with high levels of filth, steel dust (from the car wheels) and 600 volts DC. Often he had to work sixteen hours straight.
I worked as a Car Maintainer Electric at the 207th St main shop. This shop had been built around 1930 and nothing in it had been cleaned since. I worked in “Heavy Burnup” repairing cars that had had major fires and had to be completely re-wired. I also had to deal with 600V and dangerous working conditions. I made $13.26 an hour.
So together we made about $55,000 a year. With overtime, about $75K a year. We rode free on the subway too!!! We lived pretty well.
But people who keep the trains, hospitals, and schools running shouldn’t even think about living above their station. Their lot should be genteel poverty from which place they can admire their betters.
Mike
@Gravenstone:
Where are all the fucking jobs they’re supposed to have created over that period of time, and why should we believe they’d act in good faith tomorrow if the cuts were extended?
Their answer to this is, seriously, that these great producers have been afraid to create jobs because the Kenyesean Anti-colonialists would some day come along and raise their taxes.
chopper
@jeff:
100K in new york isn’t bad, unless you have kids or want to live in a nice-ass neighborhood. if you’re willing to settle for a regular run-of-the-mill place to live 100K isn’t bad at all.
Dave in NYC
The main reason that you don’t feel rich living in NYC (well, really just certain parts of Manhattan) on $250k is that there are a fair number of people in this town who make or have a lot more money than that. And also because you don’t appreciate how people who truly “aren’t rich” live.
To be fair, the people I know in that income bracket don’t make “$250k a year”–they are relatively young, have only been making that kind of money for a year or two, don’t feel like they have a ton of job security in this economy, and in some cases have a fair amount of student debt to pay back. They may have a big number on their W-2, but it’s not like they’ve been able to save up a huge nest-egg. Still, relatively speaking they are quite well-off.
IntelVet
Mr. Furious,
From a co-worker who has a brother and a cousin who are Hudson River ferry boat captains.
When Sully ditched his aircraft in the Hudson River, it is a fact that at that moment, he became the lowest paid captain on the Hudson River.
AlanDean
Remember Michael Steele’s comment that after taxes a million dollars isn’t much. I will never see a million dollars in my entire lifetime. And a lot of top tier incomes pay 15% on capital gains.
Jeff Darcy
I’m sure somebody has already said something similar, but this is a simple reflection of the pundits’ egotism. $250K isn’t much for somebody who’s the next Howard Roark or Hank Rearden, which these folks all imagine themselves to be. At the same time, $100K is way too much for somebody who is obviously not a Randian hero (despite any outward appearance of being more productive than the pundits). There’s nothing inconsistent here at all, *if* you accept the thesis that all it takes to become an economic ubermensch is reading the right books and then repeating them verbatim.
As for the whole “lower taxes will help them start more new businesses” thing, well, we all know that’s bullshit. If you want use taxes to foster new business, give the tax breaks to the new businesses themselves or their employees – not to people who might or might not start a new business, which might or might not hire people in this country and might or might not actually be a net-positive for the economy instead of just being another faux-privatization leech on the body politic.
P.S. @chopper I definitely want to live in a nice-ass neighborhood, but perhaps not in the way you meant.
Jager
@Bob L
Actually most of his “cheap” employees are pretty damn good, on time, do their jobs and most do it very well, they aren’t shitty employees at all. He just doesn’t like paying them no matter how well they do for his business. My client ( a guy I’ve know for a long time, BTW) like so many of the “owner” class just get so seperated from the day to day operations that they don’t understand their business very well anymore, they don’t see the nuts and bolts or even understand what it takes to get those nuts screwed on the bolts on a daily basis. He sees the P&L and not the people and to him the people are just too expensive. I used to like him, not so much anymore.
moe99
http://www.jg.net/article/20100914/NEWS03/309149993/1006/NEWS
The myth that the wealthy will spend their tax cuts and help the trickle down economy is a frakkin’ myth.
grumpy realist
I forget which member of the upper-crust said back around 1900: “we are not rich. We only have a few million.”
I’ve always described NYC as a place where you need a $100K salary to be middle-class. Find it hard to believe that there’s any place where $250K/year wouldn’t be “rich”, however.
Wish I were making at that level….
New Yorker
@chopper:
Depends on your definition of “nice-ass neighborhood”. Ridgewood in Queens is a safe, clean neighborhood with a large stock of charming limestone townhouses, but it sure isn’t “Sex and the City” glamorous. To me, however, it’s a “nice-ass neighborhood”, and I could afford to live there like a king on $70k a year.
I have no fucking pity for someone making $100k a year who feel too “poor” to live on Central Park West.
Jager
I was talking to a guy in my business yesterday and he said something about the cutbacks in personel, roughly 15%. He said “now that the deadwood is gone” things are going to get better. In my business the “deadwood” shit canned has been highly successful management and sales people. I guess the definition of “deadwood” is over 50 and highly paid with a big skill set! One of the biggest operators in my business bragged at a conference 3 years ago that everyone who worked for his company making over 250k had a target on their back, then he was moving to 175, then to 125 and when, in his words, it leveled out at 75 to 100k, we’ll be in good shape. After a year of that bullshit, he got fired (making a base of 900k plus) their sales are down, market position down and I pity his successor.
rikyrah
as a single person whose overhead is bare bones as I can get it..
yes, I would do quite well on 250k/year.
and for the Democrats who defend this garbage, we just should get rid of them.
NonyNony
@Jager:
Isn’t it funny how “everyone” doesn’t always mean “everyone”? I guess in this case, at least, he got hit too.
And yeah, this is how corporate pirates operate. They swoop in, fake good numbers by juggling payroll to make it look like profits are improving by eliminating “costs” (i.e. well paid staff), and hope to get out of dodge and leave the next guy with the hot potato. It’s a scam that has been working for at least 30-40 years. They’re good for pumping up the stock price short term, but they are absolutely terrible for long-term success of corporations. More than any other factor, I think that corporate piracy has destroyed America’s corporations. If a foreign power did the kinds of things the corporate pirates do we’d think it was an act of economic warfare.
binzinerator
@El Cid:
Good point. But I would note that the rich were between a rock and a hard place with the New Deal. The rich in 1933 were looking at a very real possibility of revolution and riot. Hoovervilles, millions and millions of idle, angry men, malnutrition and breadlines, unions organizing, the Communist Party with millions of members, an army of pissed-off veterans marching on Washington DC that had to be dispersed by gunfire and tanks. The writing was on the wall. The rich capitalists were looking at the abyss and supported the New Deal it out of survival.
Ironically FDR’s program made him the conservative: he saved capitalism and the institutions of the state. He kept most of the status quo, most importantly, capitalism survived and the rich got to keep what they had.
Yup. I guess because there aren’t hoovervilles or breadlines and they’ve effectively negated the threat of communism, or cripes even soci-alism, by demonizing it. (Fascism seems to be OK — they get to keep their wealth AND they can decide who will be lined up against the wall.)
binzinerator
@Maude:
Perfect.
mm
People don’t understand progressive tax rates. They think they’re paying the higher percentage on all their income.
People don’t understand all the deductions that rich people and corporations take. People don’t understand how the IRS has been defunded and does not have the resources to check figures on those lines of the income tax form that only the rich use.
People don’t understand that a business making $100,000 gross isn’t the same as a business making $100,000 net.
People think their taxes are too high. They always think that they have gone up compared to the previous year. And it’s federal taxes that they think about in this case.
People don’t understand that their local taxes do go up constantly along with fees because the rich aren’t paying their share of federal taxes so federal aid to the states has been cut and state aid to your town has been cut.
People don’t understand that their wages are too low and haven’t kept up with inflation or productivity for 30 years.
Since your wages are down people get upset when somebody in their class are actually doing well, hence the hatred of unions and teachers and transport workers and auto workers.
Do I have a solution? I wish I did.
Stu
@QDC: What does people abusing the federal disability system have to do with the base salary paid by the local transit agency that employs them?
dave
@Tax Analyst: Thanks for the correction, I don’t know why I mis-remembered that maybe I was thinking about the future rate:-)
The whole tax rate thing has me perplexed. Not so much those in the top 5%, I kind of understand their way of looking at it, but I don’t agree with it. It’s the rage I see from the tea baggers and lower income folks who should be right beside me rooting for this that I can’t figure out. I’ve been working for 40 years and I doubt I’ve ever paid a lower percentage of income taxes than I do now. Sure, I earn 10-20 times the money I did 40 years ago but my final annual income tax rate is lower. Then again some of these are the people who are afraid the government will take over their medicare and social security. Oh, well gotta vote, not too many opposed races on the D side here but need to start working toward the general.
My state rep. (D) retired, my U.S. rep (D) retired, my Governor (D) retired, and my (D) senator is facing a serious race.
cab
@Dothax:
Thank you! I passed this along to everyone I could think of.
However, I don’t know if I advise using rationality in your arguments. It is rarely well respected. You’re better off with a couple of good points and a witty remark.
mm
I was self-employed from 1973 until 2002 and don’t see what the problem is with taxes.
Especially when I started out the Investment Tax Credit helped me afford machines and since I leased them, I was able to write off the lease payments every year. I would typically get one on a five year lease and after three years lease the newer equipment and add the penalty to the new machine’s lease.
I worked night and day and if I needed help, would use freelancers on a temporary basis. I gave them a 1099 at the end of the year and could write off what I paid them.
Once I got enough work for an employee I would hire them and put them on the books. People would ask why I don’t pay them under the table and I’d answer that it doesn’t pay unless you have a cash business and I didn’t.
I paid my taxes. While I would have loved to have kept the money I always thought that if I had to pay taxes it meant that I was making a profit.
Do you know what really bothered me? Sales taxes. There are so many rules there for what is taxable and what isn’t. And some localities have local rates too. It’s just more trouble than it’s worth. I guess it will never change because the poor pay a higher percentage of their income to sales taxes than do the rich. Paying the sales tax bill is no problem because you’ve collected the money and you know exactly how much to put aside.
Payroll taxes and estimated taxes can be planned for. I don’t understand the problem with raising the minimum wage. Unless you’re making no profit it isn’t enough to worry about.
What is enough to worry about is health care premiums. Every few years we’d have to get a new carrier because the rates would go up unbelievable percentages each year. Then we’d get a new company with low teaser rates that took the pressure off for a while until they started jacking them up. The employees would all have to find new doctors and the co-pays and prescriptions would wreak havoc with your budget.
dave
@mm: You must not be rich :-)
Comrade Mary
@Jeff Darcy:
QFMFT.
Cacti
If you make $250,000 a year, you’re in the top 3% of income earners in the United States.
When you bring in more money than 97% of your fellow citizens annually, yes, you’re rich.
Holden Pattern
@Dothax:
Now this was informative. Thanks.
@Omnes Omnibus:
So… my wife and are mid-career DINKs in a very high-cost area on a coast. Between the two of us, we make a very good living, and live below our means, though we do own a small house (ridiculously expensive anywhere else in the country, but not expensive here, and we got tired of hearing every damn thing our multi-unit neighbors did).
We aren’t anywhere close to that number, and probably never will be. We can’t save enough (really, we *couldn’t* save enough), and there’s no rate of return on any investments any more to generate a compounding effect. We pay pretty high marginal taxes, which I don’t resent particularly, but what I do resent is that we don’t get security for it. The savings we have, which are FAR FAR more than most people our age, would be wiped out very quickly by the hospital costs of one serious illness or accident. Period. We’d lose our little house, we’d lose the money we’re saving for our (20+ years hence) retirement. And if one of us were disabled, that would basically be the end of the game as far as living the middle-class life we’ve aspired to. Not having to worry about that constantly would be “rich” as far as I’m concerned.
Of course, we do pay for the most expensive military in the world, so there’s that.
It’s a nasty Catch 22. The vicious class warfare waged on behalf of the ruling classes prevents the nation from putting in place the kinds of protections that would reduce fear and conflict among the working classes (all of the working classes). But it’s just that fear and conflict that makes it so hard to get those protections in place.
KDP
@NonyNony: And on top of that, we are only talking about their taxable income. That is the income left after taking the allowable deductions and exemptions.
My gross income is ~73k, my taxable income on my W-4 is ~55k (medical premiums for spouse and 15% to 401k off the top). After I take my mortgage deduction, personal exemption, tuition deduction, charitable contributions, and allowable business deductions (I work from my home since my company gave up its offices), my taxable income is usually between 39 and 45K.
I’d very much like those arguing for these points to be much clearer about how the impact will affect the person who grosses 250k.
Oh, and I live in Bay Area of California, pay off my credit cards every month, pay my tuition at CSU out of pocket, save money and feel that I am quite comfortably situated. Partner makes a third of my income and contributes ~1500 towards our household expenses. When he gets overtime, the excess goes into HIS savings.
KDP
@Gravenstone: In other countries, on other continents, where payroll is much lower.
I think one of the single most valuable things that could be done would removing the incentives for corporate executives to consider shareholder value over stakeholder values. Stakeholders include, but are not limited to, shareholdres. Stakeholders include the workforce, the community, the government agencies with whom you work.
Aaarrrgggghhhhh!!!!!
Johnny B
@Dothax:
Thank you Dothax for pointing out a critical, I might say, the most critical aspect of our political situation. Invariably, you will hear one of the Gaultians claim how unfair it is that they pay 35% of their income to the government. That simply isn’t true. Few, if any, Americans at the highest income braket pay the full 35% tax.
This whole sorry mess goes back to Saint Ronnie, who (along with Democrats) raised Social Security taxes (tax hike on the middle class) and cut income taxes on the highest earners (tax cut for the wealthy). Today, thirty years later, the percentage of federal revenues generated from Social Security nearly matches federal revenues generated from personal income tax.
So, yes, Virginia, we need to raise taxes on the rich, or, if they prefer, “the affluent,” or “the wealthy” or “the producers.” I don’t really care what you call them, but a significant tax hike is needed.
RoninJin
I’ve had this argument with a glibertarian coworker. He’s always complaining about these “Union Janitors making $60,000!!!” and public employees living the life of millionaires, or something.
I tried to explain to him that maybe it just seems like they’re making more now because they’re in positions that won’t be getting shipped to China and the wages of us corporate worker bees have been stagnate for decades. They’re making what we SHOULD be making, if our wages went up at the same pace as say, executive compensation, or increases in productivity.
I don’t understand why people like him have so much hostility to these people, and has no problem with the CEO of our company making $13 million+ at our direct expense, while laying hundreds of our coworkers off. I don’t get it.
dave
And on all income, interest/investment as well as earned income, Oh, welcome to the real world hedge fund mgrs.
Holden Pattern
@RoninJin: I’m guessing resentment that these people don’t know their place. They are servants, and should be just hanging on to their hovels by their fingernails in order for them to be appropriately obsequious.
Stefan
We aren’t anywhere close to that number, and probably never will be. We can’t save enough (really, we couldn’t save enough), and there’s no rate of return on any investments any more to generate a compounding effect. We pay pretty high marginal taxes, which I don’t resent particularly, but what I do resent is that we don’t get security for it. The savings we have, which are FAR FAR more than most people our age, would be wiped out very quickly by the hospital costs of one serious illness or accident. Period. We’d lose our little house, we’d lose the money we’re saving for our (20+ years hence) retirement. And if one of us were disabled, that would basically be the end of the game as far as living the middle-class life we’ve aspired to. Not having to worry about that constantly would be “rich” as far as I’m concerned.
This. It’s very simple: if you’re rich, you don’t have to work. If you have to work to maintain your lifestyle, or if you fear getting laid off or your high-paying job being outsourced to China, you’re not rich.
If you’re rich, you don’t have to save for retirement or your kids’ education or for health emergencies, because you already have lots of money. If you have to put money aside for such things, you’re not rich.
By that standard, people who make $250K in this country aren’t rich. They’re comfortable, they’re upper-middle class, they’re well-off, they’re doing better than people only making $25K, etc. — but they’re not rich.
And by that standard, people in saner developed nations, nations which provide their citizens with a basic level of education and healthcare and retirement security, are far “richer” than many high-earning professionals in this country.
Joshua
On Yglesias yesterday there was a post about raising the retirement age. One of the first comments (Yglesias attracts a strange mix of glibertarians and dickwads) was about how the stupid middle class spends all their money instead of saving it for retirement so why should we be bailing them out at old age? They need to take responsibility and save.
Yet one of the first arguments against raising tax on income over $250K is that $250K is really not that much money because they have to pay their mortgage, and they have car payments, and their kids need to go to private school, you see, and piano lessons ain’t free, and vacations to Europe really add up, so really why aren’t we cutting them some slack?
For some reason both of these arguments are accepted common wisdom.
This country’s materialism and blind worship of money and the rich is just perverted and gross.
Stefan
In NY, I made about 27k in 1995 and my mate made about 18k. We had an awesome 2 bedroom near Columbia and felt like kings. Something tells me that anyone making these arguments about $250k=not rich, has never, ever in their life had the slightest thought about living on a budget, making sure bills are paid first and the simple joys of mostly home cooking with a luxurious day at a Barnes & Nobles bookstore reading café.
Something tells you wrong. I make more than $250K now, but there was also a time when I would have killed, literally killed, for a $45K household income. Making sure bills are paid would have been a luxury, because I couldn’t pay them at all, and I read plenty of books at B&N because I couldn’t afford to buy them.
So I know what it is not to have money, and I can also say that $250K isn’t rich — not in this country, at least, because $250K still leaves you one cancer scare or car accident away from losing it all to medical bills.
Face it, there’s always going to be people who make more than you and people who make less — but this “$250K is rich!” is just another form of disguised class warfare by the real plutocrats (people who make $250K in a day). It’s a just a fancier version of turning the proles on each other.
les
@Dothax:
Assuming all Bush cuts expire, your comment misses a couple of things (but I would certainly join you in going for a more progressive regime–how about some new brackets kicking in at 500K, 1MM, etc?) But–Bush dropped capital gains from 20% to 15%; reversing that is a 33% increase in tax on gains.
Bush also taxed dividends like gains; reversing that (to tax dividends like earned income) will more than double the rate on dividends. Compared to a 10% increase in the top marginal rate on earned income, these are bigger deals, and are fairly progressive given who takes home most of the capital gains and dividends. And which is why the squealing about small biz is nonsense; the push to keep Bush policies comes from the same people who worry about the “death tax”–the actually wealthy.
Stefan
I lived in Brooklyn Heights on less than $40,000 a year and I lived pretty damn well.
The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights is $1,720, so about $20,000 a year, excluding utilities.
If you managed to live “pretty damn well” on $40,000, you were either (i) living somewhere where you were paying well-below market price for an apartment, in which case your example isn’t representative, or (ii) paying over half your pre-tax income for housing, in which case I don’t see how you lived pretty damn well off the remainder.
Slippy
@RoninJin:
I would be asking him how he can talk with that giant wealthy cock in his mouth.
Stefan
I don’t understand why people like him have so much hostility to these people, and has no problem with the CEO of our company making $13 million+ at our direct expense, while laying hundreds of our coworkers off. I don’t get it.
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” — John Kenneth Galbraith
Donald G
Hey, rich people –
If you’re havin’ trouble livin’ like a rich person in Manhattan on $250,000/year, there’s an easy solution. Live someplace where the cost of living isn’t so goddamned high and that 250K per annum goes a lot further. Come to “Real America” and invest some of that money into Main Street instead of Wall Street.
Yeah, you’d lose the status and cachet that comes from living and working in the city that never sleeps. You’d lose the glitz and the glamour, and your income would suffer a realistic market adjustment to account for your new location and living circumstances, but maybe you’d get a clue what everyday people have to worry about and possibly regain your souls.
Stefan
So this 250K earner is paying 22.5 + 8(FICA) + 9 (CA State income) = 39%. Add sales tax and property tax and it comes close to 50%. Show me a millionaire that pays 39% in taxes. Show me one that pays 35%. They won’t because it is all taxed at preferred rates of investment income. They have all ways to skip taxes.
According to the IRS, the top 400 income earners in the US paid, on average, 16% in taxes.
Stefan
If you’re havin’ trouble livin’ like a rich person in Manhattan on $250,000/year, there’s an easy solution. Live someplace where the cost of living isn’t so goddamned high and that 250K per annum goes a lot further.
But you won’t get paid $250K in someplace else. The jobs that pay $250K mainly exist in Manhattan (and LA, DC, etc).
It would be nice to earn a Manhattan salary and be able to live in Bosie, Idaho, but in most cases it doesn’t work that way. Bosie companies pay Bosie salaries.
Sure, there’s plenty of cheap places to live in this country. You know why? Because no one wants to live there.
Stefan
I lived in Brooklyn Heights on less than $40,000 a year and I lived pretty damn well.
Let me go back to this. After combined federal, state and local taxes, which will put the bite on you for another $8,000 or so, let’s say you have $32,000 a year in after-tax income.
Now assume you pay the average Brooklyn Heights rent of $20,000/year for a one-bedroom apartment. Subtract that and you have $12,000 left over. Add utilities (phone, internet access, electricity, etc.), which we’ll call about $1,800 yearly, and you have $10,200.
Of course, you have to get to work, so let’s figure in the $89 a month unlimited subway Metrocard, so now you have $9,132.
You’re responsible and want to save for retirement and emergencies, so you put aside 10% of your pre-tax income, or $4,000, in an IRA and savings account. Now you have about $5,000.
Forgot about groceries, though! Let’s call that, oh, $200 a month, so $2,600 total, which leaves you with $2,400.
Now I suppose you could live “pretty damn well” in NYC for about $2,400 a year, or $6.57 a day (in a neighborhood where the Montague St. Starbucks charges $3.80 for a morning coffee and bagel), assuming of course you never went to restaurants or took vacations or had any medical expenses or had children. But I’m having trouble seeing it.
Adam Lang
@Stefan:
So you would argue, then, that people making $250k or more should not have their taxes increased?
Personally, I think that everyone making more than $50k a year (and yes, I’m one of those people) should have their damn taxes increased. But then, I’m informed by usually reliable sources that I’m stupid, so there is that.
Donald G
Stefan:
I did acknowledge that one wouldn’t keep getting $250 K after relocating. I did write:
.
As I said, consider the reduced wages a “market adjustment” to the “irrational exuberance” of the large metropolitan salary model.
As far as no one wanting to live in the cheap places, I’ll grant you places like Beckley, West Virginia. But there’s Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Richmond, Atlanta, Norfolk, Fort Worth (I prefer it to Dallas), which, although they may not be the cheapest (or most enlightened) places to live, are certainly cheaper than New York or San Francisco.
b-psycho
“Rich” is comparative up to a point. From where I stand, a single person making 35k a year has a lot of money, meanwhile they see themselves as struggling compared to someone pulling six figures.
Holden Pattern
@Adam Lang: I can’t speak for Stefan, but I won’t object to having my taxes raised in order to provide better services and more security for the majority of my fellow citizens.
I’m pretty sure, though, that any increase in taxes is going to go largely toward endless colonial adventurism, more massive profits for war profiteers, more subsidies of the fossil fuel industry, more stupid subsidies of lobbied-up industries, more propping up of the arbitrageur parasites in the partnerships at Goldman Sachs etc. etc. etc. Money is fungible, and we as a nation piss away a lot on the richest people and most pointlessly violent actions, and then cluck our tongues sadly at the lack of funds for schools and health care.
All that said, I will even support having my taxes raised, EVEN to pay for that garbage in order, in order to break the winning streak of the no-new-taxes-ever know-nothings, and show that taxation is not 100% toxic.
Stefan
So you would argue, then, that people making $250k or more should not have their taxes increased?
No, I wouldn’t argue that at all. Of course someone making $250K should pay more than someone making $50K. That’s only fair and proper.
What I am saying, however, is that there should be further tax brackets to capture the income of the truly rich. If we only top out at $250K, then most of the tax increase burden falls on middle-aged two-income urban professionals rather than on the truly rich.
Right now someone making $250,000 is in the same tax bracket as someone making $2,5000,000, someone making $25,000,000 and someone making $250,000,000, which is insane (and effectively the people at the top end are paying less than the guy making $250K, because while he’s getting most of his income from salary, they’re getting most of theirs from investments which are taxed at a preferential rate).
There should be a lot more daylight between those amounts, and the people who make the truly staggering amounts of money in those country should pay more.
Stefan
I can’t speak for Stefan, but I won’t object to having my taxes raised in order to provide better services and more security for the majority of my fellow citizens.
I don’t object either. I’d happily pay more for that.
However, right now I pay about 50% combined, and yet what do I get for it? Do I and all citizens get a guaranteed quality education for our children from pre-K through college, do we get universal medical care, do we get retirement security, do we get a working infrastructure and public transportation system, do we get government provided childcare? Not really. If I want those things, I still have to pay for them myself on top of the taxes I’ve already paid (and others who can’t pay have to go without).
I don’t mind paying taxes — rather, I mind how little we demand of our government and of ourselves for what we do pay.
Silver
@Stefan:
You get lots of dead brown people and you get to beat up on a shitty little country every 10 years or so. Suck on it, as it were…
You don’t find that more beneficial than universal healthcare? What are you, some kind of commie?
ruemara
@Stefan:
You know what, schmuck? Bite me. This has nothing to do with people being richer than me.
El Cid
@binzinerator: Yes, that’s the point I was making about many — not all — of the most super-wealthy capitalist class backing FDR New Deal programs, for their own interests.
I think you might be wrong, though, against the power of Hoovervilles and the like to get such rational foresightedness out of the current crop of vampire capitalists.
I think they’d be fine with us collapsing into a 1970s junta style South American mess with a super-rich class, their professional and lower class servants, and the vast majority ranging from mind-blowingly impoverished to a degree of just-remaining-above-starvation.
liberal
@Stefan:
Or even more simply: “rich” is a function of wealth, and “wealth” is a function of net assets, not annual income.
liberal
@El Cid:
IIRC, Thomas Ferguson in The Golden Rule showed that the industries that supported FDR were the capital intensive ones. Why? FDR’s reforms tended to make labor more costly, but a capital intensive industry would suffer relatively less. And the benefit of supporting FDR was greater access to the levers of the state.
liberal
@Stefan:
This was also put forth in “Soak The Very, Very Rich”:
Steeplejack
@Stefan:
I am skeptical of this. Are you saying that it’s impossible to find gold-plated health insurance–or even just good health insurance–on an income of $250K a year?
Holden Pattern
@Steeplejack: Yep. If you’re self employed and have a pre-existing condition. With any luck, that will be fixed by 2014 when the “Health Reform” bill kicks in. But even INSURED people can hammer through their insurance very quickly and lose huge chunks of their savings, particularly if they pick up a chronic illness.
Dr. Wu
They are also saying that you have to give the rich their rightful tax cuts because they create jobs.
…in India and China.
Stefan
Yep. If you’re self employed and have a pre-existing condition. With any luck, that will be fixed by 2014 when the “Health Reform” bill kicks in. But even INSURED people can hammer through their insurance very quickly and lose huge chunks of their savings, particularly if they pick up a chronic illness.
And, of course, if you get sick enough you can’t keep working, so you can’t keep the $250K salary. And then when the job goes, so does the insurance.
Incmac
In NY, I made about 27k in 1995 and my mate made about 18k. We had an awesome 2 bedroom near Columbia and felt like kings. Something tells me that anyone making these arguments about $250k=not rich, has never, ever in their life had the slightest thought about living on a budget, making sure bills are paid first and the simple joys of mostly home cooking with a luxurious day at a Barnes & Nobles bookstore reading café.
You know what? You were rich. Something tells me that anyone making these arguments about a childless couple making $55k and living like kings in an awesome 2 bedroom while being able to cook meals at home and waste whole days in a bookstore not working=not rich, has never, ever in their life had the slightest thought about being homeless, worrying about whether you were going to eat that day, and the simple joys of dumpster diving with a luxurious day of walking around on foot from one job site to another trying to find work.