You see, the top 1 percent has its own top 1 percent\u2014the richest of the rich\u2014and those lucky enough to count themselves within its ranks would be the big winners from a cut in the top rate of income tax to 28 percent\u2014and they\u2019d be even bigger winners from Romney\u2019s proposal to extend indefinitely the present 15 percent rate on capital gains and dividends.<\/p>\nMeanwhile the lower 99 percent of the top 1 percent\u2014and the next 2 percent after them\u2014will lose much more from the removal of the tax deductions than they will gain from lower rates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/cite>Many Americans fail to understand where they fit in the economics of all out class warfare being waged by the ultra wealthy. Come to think of it, it is less like a war than a massacre. The real victims (at least those who understand of what they are victims) are without recourse. Even before the outright legalization of bribery with the Citizens United<\/i> decision, campaign contributions decided elections. Really, the change in the graft was simply in manner: from discrete to overt. Money had already been a big part of any campaign, and those with the most discretionary spending available for such trivia as elections are those with the most period. The nonchalance with which the court dismissed a decades old Montana law written in response to the literal purchase of a Senate seat by an obscenely rich asshole.<\/p>\n
…but I digress…<\/p>\n
This is where the tax cuts proposed by Romney really go:<\/p>\n
In other words, a big tax cut of greatest value to those earning more than $500,000 a year (the people who pay the top rate on the majority of their income) will be offset by a tax increase that will fall most heavily on those who earn between $100,000 and $300,000 of taxable income.<\/p>\nPeople in the $100,000\u2013$300,000 group are likely to think of themselves as \u201cmiddle class.\u201d They\u2019re wrong about that: $100,000 of adjusted gross income puts you into the top 20 percent of taxpayers; at $300,000, you are richer than 98 percent of your fellow Americans. You might call people in the $100,000\u2013$300,000 range the \u201clower upper class.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/cite> So what this comes down to is that the large majority of working professionals will be the ones hardest hit by new tax regulations. Those least affected will be trust fund babies and their ilk.<\/p>\n
But Frum’s last sentence really hits home:<\/p>\n
Mike L., the software engineer, says that this country has never resented the successful.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s true. But nowadays it sometimes seems that the very most successful resent everybody else\u2014starting first with the people occupying the rungs of the ladder immediately below their own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/cite>As the silver spooners see it, all peasants are stupid, and it is the god-given right of the superior (read:rich) to exercise dominion over the inferior. Unfortunately for Jaguar salesmen and anesthesiologists, they are among the latter. If only it were possible to convince them of this using only the abundant and obvious evidence…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have been ranting about this to passersby for years now, but only when a credentialed journalist gets addresses an issue is it heard. Yesterday, former Bush, Jr. speechwriter and current Daily Beast contributor David Frum had a piece on one of my pet peeves. It is wonderfully titled “Upper-Class Warfare: How Romney Would Screw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":610,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions\/610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}