Thursday, July 9, 2009

So Much for the Break

Megan has another question today:


So What About That Surtax?


A Democrat of my acquaintance, who makes something, but not a huge something, over $200,000 a year while living in Manhattan, was recently grousing to me about the surtax. "My taxes on a marginal dollar are going to go up almost 1000 basis points!" said he.

This is true, I agreed. And just what, I wondered, had he thought was going to happen if he elected Obama? Not clear. Our subject had listened to Obama talk about taxing people who made more than $250,000, which seemed entirely reasonable; he hadn't realized that being single, his tax hikes would start much lower than that--that he, too, was "the rich". Mentally speaking, the rich don't live in eight hundred moderately roach-infested square feet in an unfashionable neighborhood of New York.
Speaking of invidious comparisons, doesn't McHypocrite have a whole bunch of posts about people being stupid for living in NYC? Didn't she say once that people who advocated rent control were silly and "didn't have a god given right to a co-op in the city" or something quite similar? I'd give you a link, but we're blogging MM style.

I dunno, man, I grew up in central Jersey. It was a pretty awesome place to live, a popular commute was to the city, and my father's 100-200k a year was enough for a great 5 bedroom in a great neighborhood with great schools. It was walking distance to the train. I guess it pays to not be retarded.

Fuck, I know a waitress in NYC that is in a decent neighborhood and has more than 800sqft. It's called Brooklyn, Megan's stupid friend (or mythical taxicab driver), and it's not nearly as bad as it sounds.
A few readers emailed to ask me about the proposed 4% income tax surcharge on incomes over $250,000, and what I think is that this experience will eventually be renacted(for fuck's sake, woman, do you even KNOW what the red line under most of the words you type MEANS? -ed) down the income chain. What's really astonishing is how little money the thing is expected to raise: less than $100 billion a year over the next ten years. That's not even enough to cover the current static estimates of the health care plans on the table.
OMG, ONLY $100,000,000,000? That's a paltry 5% of all yearly healthcare costs FOR THE COUNTRY for a whopping 4% increase over the lowest top marginal tax rates that we've had in decades. WHAT WERE WE THINKING WITH THIS WHOLE IDEA OF PAYING FOR HEALTH INSURANCE FOR EVERYONE?!?!?!
Needless to say, I don't think the plan will cost as little as it is projected to, since virtually no US government health care plan in history ever has.
Love the two-fer here. Add the qualifier "US government" so that all the successful health care plans don't count and then provide no evidence for even her incredibly narrow claim.
Meanwhile, the gaping maw of Medicare opens ever-wider.
God I wish they still taught English majors the definition of a cliche.
Obama is going to have to push much farther down the income ladder to pay for it all,
If only he had thought to pay for things as he went, like some presidents that Megan voted for, supported for years and never criticizes in any real fashion.
This hardly dooms his electoral chances--my acquaintance remains a die-hard Democrat. But it sure won't be popular.
Megan's totally right. Rich Ordinary Joe's are going to be super pissed about slight tax increases to prevent poor people from living in squalor. They were all like "Obama's fairies will pay for health care" when they voted for him because they're stupid socialists who haven't read history like Megan totally has.

Best fact ever: The only numbers a quick googling can find for the total yearly cost of the Obama health care plan vary from 75-150 billion dollars. OMG! What will we do with the the adequate amount of money we have to pay for the very useful program????

4 comments:

Susan of Texas said...

I'm still working on her Bush tirade. I hate it when she gets hopped up on mochachinos.

Dhalgren said...

Megan needs to disclose what she means by an 'unfashionable neighborhood of New York.'

We have to assume this is Manhattan, since Megan is on the record stating that only Manhattan qualifies as the real New York.

By 'unfashionable', we have to assume that this means there are no celebrities or a Whole Foods nearby.

That narrows it down to just a few neighborhoods. namely, Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood (where I live in a 900 square-foot 2-bedroom in what I consider to be somewhat fashionable, considering it is still in the 212 area code).

Nimed was thinking the same thing:

Also, you may want to stop trying to make us feel sorry for people who just have to live in Manhattan and then complain about their miserable lives in roach-infested small apartments. People in the rest of the country, where you can live a pretty "rich" life with $200,000, just aren't very sympathetic to the plight of your friend - who is, by the way, perfectly capable of affording a much better apartment than the one you described in Brooklyn, Newark, Long Island, or the Bronx. Even in Manhattan, he can get a really nice place in Inwood, Washington Heights or Upper Harlem.

Anonymous said...

Unfashionable means there is a black person who isn't Jay-Z living in the building...

Downpuppy said...

I got into it with her on the 1000BP idiocy.

Kinda pleased with the result. Showed that she missed half the story, then was too lazy to use a tax table when she tried to backfill.