Mad? I'M NOT MAD!!!!

Oh, goody, Megan's talking about herself taxes! What fun!

According to Megan, some dude thinks we should raise the top tax brackets. Apparently the idea that a top bracket in the neighborhood of $400k isn't optimal is actually worth discussing these days. I'm sure there's lots of people who think there is no meaningful difference between 400 thousand and 400 million dollars a year that really need to be argued with.

Anyway, this dude Megan quotes is all like "some people are angry and bitter" and then Megan's all like "OMG, WTF! I am totally NOT angry and bitter! Uh, like, life's too short for that. It's just like Dez-Cart sez!" Well, no, seriously, she says:

I'm not angry and bitter; I'm about as mad as I am at the prospect of people who bought homes they can't really afford getting a bailout while I continue renting--which is to say, not very. Life is rather too short to spend it getting angry at remote strangers.

Yeah, we all wish we were as majestically sanguine as Megan. She doesn't let the little things, like stupid poor moochers getting all uppity--thinking they deserve a house--and then buying the home that the financial experts enthusiastically tell them they can afford. Oh, and the people that fleeced the economy and pay very little taxes.. uh... something about them too.

I mean, why get bothered at huge social injustice when there's important things to get into a huff about, like the fact that she needs to show ID to get Pseudofed or that the DMZ insists that her car actually allow her to see behind it before she legally drives it around.

To show us how not bitter she is, she follows up with this incredibly snide and baseless trenchant thought:

I also note, just as an aside, that the definition of "very rich" seems increasingly to be set at "just above the level a top-notch journalist in a two-earner couple could be expected to pull down".

Oh, really? How nice of these "journalists" to provide you with both an exact figure along which the line between rich and poor is drawn as well as their jountly filed 1040s! I mean, you aren't just making that completely the fuck up, are you Meggies? You wouldn't happen to be sniping at "top-notch journalists" out of jealousy or inferiority, would you? No, of course not. Life is too short to feel belittled by complete strangers who are much more thorough, intelligent, moral and hard working than you are.

Of course Megan's point in all this, in case you were wondering, is the following:

That said, I don't see why brackets top out at a relatively low level of income. Indeed, I don't see why we have tax brackets. They're inefficient, and a lot of them have pernicious marginal effects on those near the ceiling. Why not a continuously scaling function from negative (EITC) to some maximum? These days, people use either printed tax tables or tax software to prepare their taxes; this shouldn't present an undue hardship. Obviously, with my preference for less government, I would recenter the scale so that people making $250,000 a year pay relatively less, and those making $10 million pay relatively more, in order to make the proposal revenue neutral. But the basic concept seems bipartisan.

Ah, yes, see, Megan's not throwing a passive aggressive hissy because she actually disagrees with what she's quoting. She just has much better reasons to believe what the author believes. She has a point; why make arguments about "fairness" and "justice" when you can just mumble about "efficiency" and then you don't even need to be "human!" I also love that people who make $250K need to pay less but people that make $10 million need to pay more. Funny, I notice a lot of "third tier bloggers" seem to think the line between rich and poor just happens to fall somewhere in the range of what they can imagine themselves believably making in the future. Shocking, indnit?