Super Rich W(h)ine Party

I think we can all feel this man's pain.

We are the Super Rich

The rhetoric in Washington about taxes is about millionaires and the super rich, but the relevant dividing line between millionaires and the middle class is pegged at family income of $250,000. (I’m not a math professor, but last time I checked $250,000 is less than $1 million.) That makes me super rich and subject to a big tax hike if the president has his way.

This guy considers himself middle class and an ordinary working American. His current tax bill as a percentage of income is actually similar to my own, he pays about 1/3 of his income. How is he ever going to make ends meet if the government takes, oh, let's say 1/2 of his income? That means he would only have 10x as much money as I manage to survive on. How ever will his family survive?

I can feel his pain. It is tough to scrape by with an annual income of between $30k-$300k per year. There are people like Johnny Depp who have homes in LA, the South of France, and a private island in the Bahamas as well as a private yacht that is larger than many people's homes. It's just not fair that one extremely talented and handsome actor beloved by millions should have all that (and the tax burden that comes with it) while us ordinary folks can barely keep ourselves in a charming but rundown rental or...

Our next biggest expense, like most people, is our mortgage. Homes near our work in Chicago aren’t cheap and we do not have friends who were willing to help us finance the deal. We chose to invest in the University community and renovate and old property, but we did so at an inopportune time.

Damn those free market economics that make such investments risky ventures! And damn President Obama for proposing a tax hike on the upper-upper-middle class that gets in the way of those free market economics!

If our taxes rise significantly, as they seem likely to, we can cut back on some things. The (legal) immigrant from Mexico who owns the lawn service we employ will suffer, as will the (legal) immigrant from Poland who cleans our house a few times a month. We can cancel our cell phones and some cable channels, as well as take our daughter from her art class at the community art center, but these are only a few hundred dollars per month in total.

Tragedy! How are we supposed to afford people to do things we are perfectly capable of doing ourselves? Are we expected to live like the people we pay to do those things? Then what the hell is the point of being a natural born US citizen? Where is the justice? Where is the privilege?

Okay, I'm all sarcasmed out. Time for me to crawl back into my lower-lower-middle class hole and stop belittling the plight of the hard working upper-upper-middle class.