they don’t even realize, nor do progressives, the poor pay far higher percentage of their wage then the wealthy

the poor and middle class have to spend almost all of their wage, therefor taxed again and again after their income tax, their entire wage is subject to labor taxes

the wealthy spend only a fraction of their earnings and only a small portion is payed to labor tax

if someone pointed out that a flat tax had to include all useage and sales tax the wealthy would get off that box pronto

If they don’t want to pay the same tax rate as people making a million or more per year, would they support a super-rate on those mega-rich?

I thought not.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Maybe 15 yrs ago 200k was sort of well off but these days it is really nothing. Sure your not poor but far from rich.

The sound of someone who’s having trouble making payments on their over-priced house, and has no idea what it’s like for those of us who don’t have minimum-six-figure incomes?

If you think rich is multi-million-dollar paycheck every year, then you might not think 250K is rich, but from where I am, that’s five years of my income, and the kind of money I’d want if I were buying a house or a condo.

Today’s NYT has a great cartoon.

Another of the big arguments the commenters put forward is that the cost of living is higher in some places than others, so in those places, the income won’t make you as rich as it will in Omaha. Amazingly, there are people who live in those cities who are even poorer.

For $250,000.00 earners, how much do you save from your monthly earnings? For the lower wage earners..how much more could you use to make ends meet? Poor people usually make some poor choices which only adds to their poverty and social challenges.

Poor people often don’t have good choices available.

I was recently sitting around a table with a bunch of aging goopers drinking iced tea. They were all on social security and all complaining that the wealthy are over taxes and that what this country really needs is a flat tax….

All of them, in my opinion, would pay more with a flat tax. They imagine themselves to be among the wealthy- with social security and a few thousand a month from a pension plan….they have some sort of brain parasites that bore into the frontal lobe and make nests.

They seem to have no idea that the infrastructure and social stability that gives them the possibility of success came from taxes paid by other people, including their ancestors.

I have tried to explain this to people who see taxation as “legalized theft.” Of course, I got nowhere. So what if everyone else before them paid for their schools, roads, clean water, etc.? Stop the ride, they want off!

Hmm- doesn’t seem likely. Most pay payroll taxes- 6% or so- plus sales tax on non food purchases- maybe another 2%- plus gas tax, tobacco tax, etc.

I doubt if the total taxes rise about 15% of income for most making -say- 20-30k per year.

When people start ragging about taxes- they are usually beyond the reach of reason…..but it only lasts for an hour or so.

The conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises: the search for a moral justification for selfishness.

- JK Galbraith

JKG knew his conservatives.
They prove him right again and again, generation after generation

I posted a link which shows we pay almost half our income into taxes when all is told

I can’t get the link right now

On the other hand, rich people make bad choices, too. A number of the commenters take the Sevierville, TN optometrist to task for his choices, which include tithing $1300 monthly and buying raw land.

It’s time to return to the federal income tax rates on corporations and individuals that we had under the Eisenhower Administration.

O/T: Venezuela and Cuba are the only countries in North, Central and South America that are not controlled by major US corporations. This is a real problem for corporate America. It is time for us to close our torture facility at the Guantanamo Naval Base, then close the naval base and give it back to Cuba.

found it;

Who Pays Taxes?

The short answer is this:

you and I pay the taxes that rich and powerful people ought to pay, but don’t.

In the year 2000, at the height of the last economic boom and before the most recent round of tax cuts were enacted, IRS data shows that the richest 400 taxpayers paid 27% of their income in federal, state, and local taxes. On average, these 400 taxpayers each had taxable income of $151 million. All other taxpayers had average taxable income of only $34,600, and yet their tax burden was 40%.

Thank you for that excellent quote.

Anybody making a six-figure income can afford an accountant to tell them how to use loopholes to avoid paying more taxes. It’s total bullshit when they whine about taxes.

Nobody likes to whip out a pen and write a check when they get their taxes prepared, but if they’ve already whittled their income down with write-offs and managed to put a maximum amount in IRAs and 401Ks at the same time, they don’t have any damned business whining; they are quite well off.

And if they whine about not getting anything for their money, tell them they should have been more active participants in civic process to ensure corruption didn’t eat away at their public investments. These same assholes whining about money lost one helluva lot more during the last year due to the collapse of the financial industry than they paid in taxes, and it’s all because they were both greedy and lazy.

The utter stupidity of the poor/rich engineer who claims that he pays more in taxes than the american median income is amazing. First, that would be about $55,000, including real estate taxes (which are likely less than $5,000). Second, nobody asked that couple to live in a half-to-million dollar house. Third, if the clown is not making over $250,000 he is going to get his taxes decreased under Obama. So what is his particular beef? He has none. He is an idiot

In essence this moron lives in a magical world of his own where the laws of logic, mathematics, and nature are suspended.

What intrigues me is that none of these people seem to have the basic realization that “I’m in the top 2% of American earners and even I am unable to afford the American Consumerist Lifestyle as preached by Madison Avenue.” They refuse the insight. They deny that they are in any way rich, instead of realizing “That is seriously f’cked up.”

We are awash in misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and anti-intellectualism. Much of the nation is gripped by fear and misunderstanding, wants a quick and easy way out of anxiety and performs unfounded knee-jerk reactions when confronted with tough choices. Too many people accept smoke and mirrors in place of factual reasoning and evidence. We blame the wrong people too often and think a trip to Wal-Mart wil solve everything. And what do not know, WILL hurt us.

If I were to earn 200k this year.. i could pay off my house, all other bills including medical, of course pay my taxes… give 50k to causes like FDL, Blue America progressives, The ACLU, my local food pantry and Green candidates.. and not need to worry about money for a couple of years at least.

I just want to shake people (and scream) who think earning 200k in 5 years or less, much less one year, think they are not rich! Why is this argument always framed from the rich vs filthy rich comparisons? Ask the actual poor (70 percenters) people what rich means.

WATBs. When your income is in the top 1.5%, you are, pretty much by definition, rich, even if there are people making a lot more than you are. I urge them to try living on the median household income here in Montana of $30,000. They might gain a greater appreciation for what they have.

$200K is roughly 5x my annual salary. With one lump sum payment of $200K, I could pay off all my debts, buy a house, and live extravagantly on my current salary.

At our house, we are not whining. We filed for an extension. Plus, since I’ve been underemployed for several years, nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’.

I just had to decide whether to pay my health insurance premium, my car payment, my business equipment lease, my car insurance payment, or my student loan payment.

I can pay one of those and have $200 left for the rest of the month for gas to get to work and food. And I have to drive to San Francisco from Sacramento twice in that time.

This grind of juggling never ends. My one satisfaction is that I will die before I can ever pay off my student loan.

and of course the ultimate injustice is the FICA cap.

you want real social justice, remove that cap. have warren and bill continue to pay that percentage on all their income. social security, medicare financing problems would disappear immediately. best of all, bill, warren and all the other predators on wall street wouldn’t even miss it.

Mr. Micawber had it right, though.

Dr. Dick & Eureka Springs,
Wowzers. We’re all in pretty much the same boat. I could do the exact same things with that kind of money.
Jeez, you’d think we were all poor, dfh’s.
And, would this be a good time to ask why teachers make so little money? My brother-in-law is a tenured, full-professor at a large university in LA. He and my sister, who is also a teacher, live in a one-bedroom apartment.

Blue Texan is upstairs!
Peggy Noonan Regrets Release of Torture Memos: “Some of Life Has to Be Mysterious”

The Revolution of 1789 is over. The aristocrats lost in France, but they won here.

Wealthy capitalists have a tendency to fundamentally misapprehend the system they’re in. Wealth aggregation is inevitable without controls (controls we don’t have). At some point the markets become so top-heavy that a reset is also inevitable.

Historically resets have come in a handful of flavors. Political realignment, sovereign default, and violent labor uprising. Generally it’s a continuum, when one fails; the next is close behind.

Good link: You proved your point.

Well said, and a depressing commentary. 2% of households is about 2.8mn. Our society is stratified, so most people live in the same neighborhoods as those of approximately equal wealth and income. That helps explain how the rich think everyone is the same; they never see anyone else, so they think that is the way they should live.

I got into a to-do with some idiot who claimed that 80% of the population don’t pay any income tax. I told him that I did and I may less than $30K, and that even people below $20K paid about 10% of their income in Federal Income tax. He refused to believe it.

So I whipped out the Federal Tax tables…and I said. Okay, the single deductable is about $5400. So subtract that from the the salary and you’ll get a pretty good estimate of taxable income if a person doesn’t have dependents.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf

He freaked when I showed him that even people making less than $6000 could be paying SOME Income tax…and that the tax payments for people win the 20-30K range was 10% of their incomes. He was actually paying, with his many deductions, what someone making $20K less than him would pay. And still he was all hissy-fittin!

It’s particularly annoying to me when wingers say the rich got that way because they work hard. As if people in low-paying jobs don’t work hard. Those roofers, ag workers, anyone doing manual labor especially, work hard with little reward or recognition.
I read that WSJ story yesterday and some of the comments and was revolted.

Did you look at the tax tables? Seems most people are paying over 10%, even after the standard deduction…unless you have dependants.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf

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, economist (1908-2006)

The only justification for being paid anything at all is that you have contributed to the GDP the sum that you were paid. That is what work is all about. I find it very, very difficult to believe that these people have actually benefited the US economy to the tune of over $250,000. Alice Walton is an extreme case of being a useless animated corpse who inherited billions of dollars, but how many of these other people, especially the executive types, warrant their salaries? The people at AIG and the banks who caused this disaster certainly haven’t contributed to the general welfare at all, not to mention the amount they got paid. So when I see some overpaid, insufferable, pompous jerk claiming that he has “earned” his salary through hard work, I begin to understand the concept that there are just some people who need dying.

Well, we make that kind of money, we sure as heck don’t feel rich. We live in a modest home, our newest car is a five year old Acura, and I still don’t have a boat. We travel, but we fly coach and cram everything into a single 49.8 lb suitcase.

We pay $900/month for health insurance — that’s almost half our mortgage bill — and we’re paying off a loan for an insurance policy my wife needs for work, at about $800/month.

We can put a couple thousand dollars per month into savings. If I really wanted to buy a boat, I could. If I wanted to buy a new car, I have the cash on hand. Still, we feel comfortable, not rich.

So I can understand how people who make more than us don’t feel rich. If our income quadrupled, I still wouldn’t feel rich. Being rich doesn’t make you feel rich.

But hey, about FICA? Get rid of the regressive cap. Raise our marginal tax rates, too. We are comfortable because we live in a carefully regulated economy that makes it possible. There’s no place on earth that offers a better deal than Uncle Sam’s. I marvel daily at our good fortune. But I still don’t feel rich.

So much for trying to write, eat, and commune with a three year old, lol. I inadvertently commented with this comment below over at the Noonan/tortore article. I still think it needs to be said here as I am thoroughly sickened with the NY Times article …

This is disgusting. How elitist for the NY times to even consider this as somehow “unfair”. Where are they to defend the poor who pay upwards of 17% of their already meager incomes in taxes? The poor who do not use our infrastructures as much, who cannot even afford their own homes much less decent food for themselves and their children! When are these people going to get the hint that paying taxes is patriotic and to not pay their fair share is downright unAmerican??? Why don’t THE RICH pay 17% of their incomes??? At least they would have enough left over to live on, which you cannot say for the poor.

Gawd!

Cat In Seattle

According to the inflation calculator at WestEgg.com, $200,000 in 2007 (the last year for which figures were available) had the same purchasing power of $136,921.92 in 1992, fifteen years earlier.

I’m not saying the whining is correct, but I think a strong argument should keep in mind that even our low rates of inflation add up over a time span like 15 years. A $25,000 salary in 1982 would have the same purchasing power as a salary of $36,517.16 in 2007. Neither of those seems like “a lot of money” intuitively, but the latter seems slightly better than the former, when in fact, it’s not.

The way numbers “feel” affects how we react to them. Comparing $136,921.92 in 1992 to $200,000 in 2007 might make it seem like the person with said salary hasn’t gained as much as we’d think. But if you change the comparison to $171,152.40 in 1992 and $250,000 in 2007, it may “feel” more reasonable. I wish the inflation calculator would back-solve for past dates (I had to try some simple binary searches to get these figures), but the years add up: if the top tax bracket starts at $250,000 today, that’s the equivalent of it starting at $171,152.40 in 1992, which “feels” lower. The smaller number from 1992 “feels” like a number that a two-income household with upper middle-class earners could achieve, like two people with 10-12 years experience at a big company earning about $85,000 per year each (or slightly less but with some extra income from investments or something).

At no time in my life would I ever have reached this bracket, but I know people who have, and they definitely consider themselves “comfortable” and “doing well” (and in most cases, “lucky”), but not “rich.” Informally, in my life, “rich” feels like “I have $50,000 more income per year than I need for non-extravagant expenses,” and in 1992, for a family of four living in a place with a high cost of living like New York or San Francisco, $171,152.40 probably wouldn’t have qualified.

But if anything, this just bolsters the argument that the tax rate should be lower at $250,000 and a statistically significant higher bracket added at $500,000 or $1,000,000 — like instead of 33% at $250,000, maybe keep 28% to $500,000, then 33% from $500,001 to $1,000,000, and top it off at 36% or 39% above $1,000,000 or $2,000,000. I think that’d achieve about the same monetary affect but lower taxes for more people and more families.

The WSJ would scream bloody murder, of course, but that’s what they’re paid to do.

Such willful ignorance by Mr. Fields would certainly benefit from direct participation in an unpleasant and severe loss of income and property. I couldn’t wish such an educational experience on a more deserving human being.
At the very least, it would inform him so that he might never again flaunt such hubris.

Good point. Some people think high income makes you rich. I think being rich means having enough wealth that you don’t have to work. The more you earn, the more likely it is that you can make it comfortably into the second category. The income tax relates to the first category, but we not only don’t tax the second category, we tax income from wealth at lower rates than we do income from labor.

Look, when Forbes.com publishes an article saying taxes are low, either those $250K-plus whiny-assed titty babies can shut the hell up or it’s the Four Horses of the Apocalypse around the corner:

…The irony of these protests is that federal revenues as a share of the gross domestic product will be lower this year than any year since 1950. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government will take only 15.5% of GDP in taxes this year, compared to 17.7% last year, 18.8% in 2007 and 20.9% in 2000.

The truth is that the U.S. is a relatively low-tax country no matter how you slice the data…

What the six-figure WATB also fail to take into consideration is health care costs and how their use of the health care system is likely subsidized by many people who earn far less but are still covered by health insurance. The combined purchasing power allows the WATB to have cheaper health care than they’d have to buy on their own.

Two hundred-fifty thousand a year isn’t rich. It’s also irrelevant, in that it is more than about 98 out of 100 Americans have to get by on month-to-month.

Rich, of course, is measured by whomever has more than you do. We have enormous debts and need to pay them eventually. Why should the government make it easier for the 98th or 99th person to become the 100th person, when that leaves 97 in the wringer?

Could it be that an elderly Rupert Murdoch, worth many billions, is afraid of leaving a few billion less to his no doubt empathetic and civic-conscious heirs? And that he’s using the pages of one of his pet newspapers to save them from that misfortune?

I’d say $250k is as rich as the earner wants it to be.

Book Salon a few flights upstairs with Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from The New Deal to Reagan hosted by Rick Perlstein

Michael Lewis, ‘Mansion’:

Upper middle class: That’s how I’ve always thought of myself. Upper middle class is the class into which I was born, the class to which I was always told I belonged, and the class with which, until this moment, I’d never had a problem. Upper middle class is a sneaky designation, however. It’s a way of saying “I’m well-off” without having to say “I’m rich,” even if, by most standards, you are. Upper-middle-classness has allowed me to feel like I’m not only competing in the same financial league as most Americans—I’m winning! Playing in the middle class, I have enjoyed huge success.

In this house, I now glimpsed the problem with upper-middle-classness: It isn’t really a class. It’s a space between classes. The space may once have been bridgeable, but lately it’s become a chasm. Middle-class people fantasize about travel upgrades; upper-class people can’t imagine life without a jet. Middle-class people help their children with their homework so they’ll have a chance of getting into Princeton; upper-class people buy Princeton a new building. Middle-class people have homes; upper-class people have monuments. A man struggling to hold on to the illusion that he is upper middle class has become like a character in a cartoon earthquake: He looks down and sees his feet being dragged ever farther apart by a quickly widening fissure. His legs stretch, then splay, and finally he plunges into the abyss.

That’s the mentality that the WSJ is tapping into. And to be honest, they’re appealing to a genuine mindset — not least because the WSJ’s target audience is the top-quartile earner who thinks he’s nearly in the top percentile.

My husband and I were both fortunate enough to be college educated and to have professional careers. We don’t make 250K, but we come close. We both come from families where only our fathers worked outside the home, and had better standards of living growing up than we do now. Our parents were able to pay for our college education, save for retirement, pay off their houses and take 2 to 3 vacations a year. They had two cars and replaced them every 3 to 4 years, often paying cash for them. With two of us working, we have saved some for retirement, about half of expected college expenses and almost paid off our mortgage. We never eat out, haven’t had a vacation in over 5 years, only replace the car when it exceeds 150K miles, but we have no debt. We definitely feel the impact of reduced real wages, which is devastating for people who make less than we do. I gladly pay taxes, but unless wages rise, my children won’t be able to afford our standard of living.

http://economistsview.typepad……970c-800wi

See here for actual tax rates of different income brackets.

From someone who has less than $10,000.00 to live on and who is paying 17-19% of this income in taxes, 250 grand IS rich. Also, add another child to provide for on that income and it is VERY hard to sympathize with someone making over 25 times more. I am 57 years old, disabled, and raising my grand niece. We sure could use some of the money we are forced to spend in regressive taxes that leave us barely able to afford TP. Take me and multiply me by millions, I am not the only one ~ which is why we are the ones holding down the fort while upper income folks are aghast that they should pay a fraction of a percentage as to what the poor does and who would have far more resources to live upon if they paid the same.

Just sayin’ …

Cat In Seattle

Of course $250,000 a year isn’t rich. We learned today that this is the high end of base salaries for a new Chicago MBA.

I just went to their site, dated february this year;

Unfortunately, I have not yet found a quintile breakdown for effective tax rates that includes state and local taxes. If you can suggest a good resource for this data

I’ll stick with the metric on my link