Where Your Treasure Is, There Will Your Heart Be Also
It did not take the incoming Demagogocrats long to prove again that verse above from Luke (12:34), by shoving the bulk of their supporters aside from the trough and gobbling up the spoils of victory for their own elitists. According to today’s WaPost:
Democratic leaders this week vowed to make the alternative minimum tax a centerpiece of next year’s budget debate…. Fixing the AMT has long been a top priority for Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who is in line to head the Senate Finance Committee. … Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), the presumptive chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, this week put fixing the AMT at the top of his agenda…. And yesterday, House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who is campaigning to keep his leadership post, said Democrats will make “fixing the AMT … a priority of tax policy next year.”
The focus on the AMT is hardly surprising, given that victims of the tax have been concentrated in high-cost urban areas such as Washington, New York and San Francisco — places that tend to vote Democratic. Rangel, Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the presumptive House speaker, all represent states hit hard by the AMT, which is sometimes called the “blue-state tax.” To map states with the highest concentrations of AMT taxpayers is to draw bull’s-eyes over California and the Northeastern seaboard.
Now, if you’re Mr. or Ms. typical Demo voter, you may not be familiar with this tax, because you don’t earn enough for it to kick in, and barring great luck or the kind of runaway inflation this fifty-billion-dollar tax cut would help bring us down the road, you never will.
The impact is harshest on taxpayers with annual incomes of $100,000 to $500,000.
What is most galling is that the “party of the people” is
saying the levy threatens to unfairly increase tax bills for millions of middle-class families by the end of the decade.
There is no way that this is a burden on the real “middle-class families”, who only dream of such salaries. Only the paper shufflers inside the Beltway and over-priced big blue cities like NYC and LA would imagine themselves to be “middle-class”, since they don’t either know or talk to the great mass of people lured into voting for the Axis of Elitism this year. Not surprisingly, righties in high-tax states like Althouse are also gushing over this. Not everyone is willing to drink the liberal kool-aid over this, though. Don Surber points out
…this plan offers nothing to the 98% of Americans who do not get six-figure salaries. … This is as hypocritical as it gets.
Ah, but those 98% of the people are not the ones who give Campaign Contributions Of Unusual Size, so they aren’t first in the hearts of their incoming Solons (or perhaps impending Gracchi would be a better description). Republican Congressleeches may fawn upon and cater to the corporate executives who patronizingly invite them to mix with their betters at the country clubs, but the new Demokakic legisloons only see the ordinary working people who vote for them at rallies, while lending their ears instead to the fat check writers that get into the earlier closed receptions, where the hors d’oeuvres are notably low on the salt of the earth.
Is it too soon to bellow “We told you so”? If the new bosses really wanted to cement their rule, they would instead be pushing for tax cuts from the bottom up. They might keep committee chairs for a generation if, instead of this payoff for well-heeled apple-polishers, they proposed raising the personal deduction by a very large amount for everyone. The Repubs would be scared to vote against it once the bill got to the floor, and even Our Noble Lame Duck would fear to veto it. Ordinary Americans would celebrate and bring their children up to vote for the donkeys henceforward out of gratitude.
No, I’m not worried the Pelosis and Reids will steal my idea: they are too tone deaf to people not wearing expensive suits to consider the interests of those little people. They will ratchet down even more fiscal irresponsibility, without even scoring political gains from it. It’s their usual electoral hari-kari on the installment plan. Thank you, Max and Charlie and Steny. The government in exile welcomes your failure to seize this opportunity.
November 11th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
I don’t get it, do you think that families that make $110,000 a year are rich and not part of the middle class???? Are you for real? Maybe those making 250k and more are rich and out of the middle class, but that’s a long way off from 100K. Listen, that’s what my family is living on and I can tell you, we are not rich. I have a home, thankfully, a kid in college (I pay for part of her college costs) and another in elementary school (public, thank you.) I’m self-employed so I pay for my own health care. I live in Florida so my home insurance is skyrocketing, which is a fortune. My property taxes go up every year. A self-financed retirement plan, no pension. Yes please tell me again how “rich” I am. I hate to break it to the pundits and know it alls out there, but those families out there making less that 100K a year, who can’t afford a home of their own in a nice neighborhood with good schools, can’t afford to send their kids to private school or college, can’t afford decent health care–that isn’t the middle class, that’s poverty.
November 11th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Still further proof of how delusional are most Americans. If you make more than 98 per cent of the population, you are not by any stretch of the imagination in “the middle”. To decline to give genuinely needed tax cuts for 49 out of 50 people that aren’t part of your own self-puffed social circle, while weeping over your not being able to “send your kids to private school” — while tens of millions have to drop out of public high school and work at minimum wages just to eat — or over your not affording “decent health care” — when tens of millions have none at all and can only wait in charity emergency rooms — is hubris with a vengeance, and if the incoming Democrats choose to cater to your clueless self-absorption, then they will pay the price they and you deserve at the next election. Have a nice, and very short, day in the sun, yuppie-thinkers.
November 11th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
If I make 75-100k in NYC with two kids about to go to (state) college, I’m barely scraping by. If living in the reality based community and acknowledging that simple fact makes me a “yuppie-thinker,” so be it. Assuming that the adjustment to the AMT is done intelligently (a full repeal wouldn’t satisfy that), then it’s good policy and good politics.
while weeping over your not being able to “send your kids to private school”
She wasn’t weeping about it, douchetard: she was pointing out that she is not loaded by any stretch of the imagination.
November 11th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
I don’t get it, do you think that families that make $110,000 a year are rich and not part of the middle class???? Are you for real? Maybe those making 250k and more are rich and out of the middle class, but that’s a long way off from 100K.
are the stats googled from 2000 census if it’s any help:
Firstly, they said “taxpayers” making more than $100,000 a year. Not households.
Secondly, try looking at the Statistical Abstracts before spouting off. I can’t open XLS from here, but here the Wikipedia is also handy - in 2005, 15.82% of households made over $100,000. The median household income was $46,326; median personal income for males was $33,517, for females $19,679
If you’re less than 16%, you’re not in the middle. You may be making teh mistake of comparing yourself to those around you, rather than Americans as a whole.
November 12th, 2006 at 12:08 am
Phoenician–
I think that the problem here is that there is a significant difference between a family making $150,000 and a family making $1 million per year. The day-to-day experiences of a family making $150,000 more closely mirror those of a family making $50,000 than a family making $1 million, so they think of themselves as middle class.
jpe–
Understand that most of us don’t live in New York City. If you lived here in Salem, OR, you’d be living like a king. And even though living expenses are high in NYC, the fact is that my sister gets by just fine on half of what you make, and she also has 2 kids. If you’re just scraping by, you should start rethinking your budget priorities.
That said, I agree that a reconsideration of the AMT makes good sense, both from a political and an economic standpoint. The Republican plan is to keep it the way it is, and keep the top income tax rate low as well. Surely the Democrats can come up with a reform that doesn’t amount to shifting the tax burden from the billionaires to the millionaires.
Also, let’s not pretend that the AMT represents a punitive level of taxation. It ranges from 26-28%. If you lived anywhere else in the industrialized world, your income would make you subject to a tax burden twice as high.
November 12th, 2006 at 9:14 am
The AMT was meant to keep the wealthiest taxpayers, the top 2% or so, from using tax avoidance strategies to lower their taxes. Remember all of the stories of millionaires not paying any taxes at all???
This “Blues State Tax” needs to be indexed to inflation, that’s all.
Try to look at it like this…in California the median price for houses is around 450,000 (and that gets you out of the slums, but probably only a quarter acre lot or less). Assuming a 10% down and 6% interest rate, that means that just for mortgage (and not property taxes or insurance) you are talking about 2400 a month. Times 12 and you get to 28,000 dollars a year. State income tax for 100,000 is over 5000. Just that much brings the 100000. income to 67000. Now you’ve also got a sales tax that, depending on where you live, is in the 7.25-8.75%, I could go on, but you get the idea. That 100,000 ain’t what it used to be.
Less than 10 years ago, only 2% of the population was hit by the AMT. Soon it will be 15%.
Given the small margin of some of the Democratic victories this past week, can you think of a reason to piss off 13% of the voters?
November 12th, 2006 at 10:22 am
I’m several tens of thousands dollars away from having to worry about the AMT. I was speaking hypothetically.
That’s on top of all the other layers of taxation that would ordinarily be deducted from income. And that’s why I don’t think someone making 75-150k in, say, west Texas will be hit by the AMT: they don’t have all the other taxes and costs that will push a taxpayer into the AMT. (as Gordo explains better than I could: it’s a blue state tax, a tax on those of that think social infrastructure is woth its attendant costs)
November 12th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
to gordo
your sister’s making half of that (50K) in NYC with 2 kids and “she’s getting by just fine.” Does she own her own home or condo in a safe, clean, convenient neighborhood, with decent public schools with decent afterschool programs for her kids? Or even rent a decent apartment in a neighborhood of her own choosing, close to work or transporation? I don’t really believe that she’s getting by just fine, but whatever, since when is getting by the standard–I’d like to ask her if she’s getting ahead?
Its not a war between those making a 100K and those making 50K, we’re in it together. And we’re all being raped by the millionaires and billionaires.
November 19th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Lisa–
I meant that she makes half of $75,000 (she’s in the $35,000-$40,000 range). Also, she doesn’t live in NYC.
But give me a break. I’m to believe that the dividing line between poverty and middle class is owning one’s “own home or condo in a safe, clean, convenient neighborhood, with decent public schools with decent afterschool programs for her kids?” I’m supposed to weep for those who can’t live in any neighborhood they choose?
If life is intolerable for those whose household incomes approaches the median, then perhaps we should raise taxes and provide enough government services (transportation, schools, parks, libraries, police) to make life tolerable for the working class. As Ayn points out, half of us make less than the median. So if that’s not enough for a decent life, it’s time to fundamentally restructure the economy.