One of the most frustrating things about this whole silly “Fiscal Cliff” nonsense is that the people supporting our Galtian overlords never tell you the whole story. They just point out the things that they want you to hear- and hope that you are not smart enough, or knowledgeable enough on tax laws to spot the obvious holes in their narratives.
Take this story that appeared in the NY Post and was taunted forth by Phib.
The Post showed a chart and then told “horror” stories of how very well off people are going to “suffer”. Let’s look at the chart, shall we?
Oh the horror! The misery! Someone making 300,000 dollars a year might be reduced to the ruin of drinking Gallo with dinner instead of a fine French Burgundy! Oh, the unfairness of it all!
It must be the fault of those goddamned moochers.
Except of course its not one bit true. The chart is one of the most misleading ones I’ve yet to see in the recent month-and trust me, I have seen a fair share.
Let’s take a couple of the “horror stories” that are cited in Phib’s post and dissect it a little more shall we?
“It’s that much higher?” asked IT worker Vikas Kataria, 34, who discovered that his combined household income of about $250,000 per year will cost him nearly $10,000 more in taxes. “I thought it was a couple thousand — but that’s a lot,” said Kataria, who works at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan and is married to a systems analyst for a brokerage firm. “That’s huge!”
With higher taxes, the couple would have to cut out on traveling and family vacations.
Give me a fucking break, you, whiny, selfish, bastard.
First of all, you work for Merrill Lynch and you can’t get decent tax advice? Then you deserve to pay more taxes for being stupid. And second-by your own admission my dear Vikas, you are not going to see your taxes go up by 9730 dollars. Or have you forgotten that Post did not take your dependent deductions into account? Or that it also doesn’t factor in many of the probable tax deductions you will take because being a high earner, you have the ability to take them. And lets not forget the Post chart has deliberately left off the tax sheltering effect of even putting the maximum allowed into your 401K-which at 250K per year should be pretty easy to do.
Factor all of those things in, I’m willing to bet your taxes only go up about 5600 or so. 400 dollars a paycheck on someone receiving a pay check of almost 11000 every two weeks. ( Before taxes and other withholding). 21000 a month.
Yes that is the right number of zero’s.
God damn it all-it must really suck to be you. Oh the heartlessness of having to make ends meet on at least 13000 dollars take home a month.
When is the last time I ever saw that much money in a month? Oh right, never. And I still take vacations and drink premium quality beer-and have a piece of my hard earned retirement stolen from me every month by a thankless, fuck less, fat shrew.
But I’m supposed to feel sorry for you and your plight. Uh-huh. Right…………………………………………….
Now journey to the top end of the scale-someone making a million dollars a year is forced by the hand of a draconian government to get by on a paltry 650,000 a year. So much for that new Lexus or my business class ticket to Paris. Good God Man, just how unreasonable can you get?!?
As Mitt Romney showed us-the odds of the 1 million dollar earner actually paying the amounts listed above are slim to none. And that’s what this pointless whining fails to highlight-effective tax rates are what really matter. And those tend to be statistically higher for those in lower income brackets. Furthermore, its not going to help anyone if all the country does is continue to just hold down already low tax rates on the rich without addressing the real issues that are at stake in today’s economy. And all of this tax talk ignores the fact that neither side is doing what it needs to about addressing seriously the issues of income inequality, wage stagnation, and the forces that are crushing the American middle class. This is why I am not crying any salt tears about the plight of rich people working for Merrill Lynch or business owners who are too stupid to take advantage of incorporation rules that would lower their tax liability. And I am not afraid of the “cliff” except in how it will affect the stock market. The market of course will be affected, primarily because of the whining by people who actually have a lot to be thankful for.
AND TAX RATES WILL STILL BE THE LOWEST IN THE US IN 50 YEARS. The repeal of the Bush tax cuts will, however, restore much needed revenue to balance the budget.
That is something these morons crying about tax cuts conveniently forget.
The social costs of an austerity agenda — and, certainly, all the available evidence from those European countries wherein one was imposed — are profound. Whether you like it or not, there has been a general political consensus for the past eight odd decades that a social safety net is one of the legitimate products of that creative enterprise of self-government, that it is part of what we agree to when we form the political commonwealth. To have an austerity agenda imposed from above, and by a relatively unaccountable political elite, and because of the damage done to the nation’s finances by an absolutely unaccountable financial elite, is to make an obvious mockery of that political commonwealth, and to do so hard upon an election in which the existence of that safety net was so directly and democratically validated, is to spit in the eye of a self-governing people. This, in turn, will engage all the worst popular instincts, including ill-directed and abandoned popular wrath.-Charles Pierce.