Quote:
Originally Posted by Armistead
I'd give them plenty of tax breaks if they weren't allowed to buy off congress and write any regulation they pleased.
Corporate CEO to Lawyer " Damn, 10% more taxes"
Lawyer to CEO "Yea, but 200% increased profits"
You do the math.
|
I see no math to do. You're not "showing your work" you're just making up numbers.
People complaining about the "rich" always argue using some CEO who makes 100 million a year (or even just a few million). Meanwhile, people I consider "upper middle class" can make 500k a year, and to them the extra 25k in taxes (the 5% Bush tax cut about to expire) really matters. It's not like at 500k money is no object. That 25k is money that might be spent on a remodel of the house (employing people), or private school (2 kids private school = 25k). It's non-trivial. And those same people already pay ~155k$ in federal taxes (then more state). These are people that work for a living.
Say surgeons that work on average maybe 80 hours a week or more (depending on how you count call). General surgeons here, for example, make around 230k. That puts them square in the top 20%. They pay ~60 grand in fed taxes. The average income in the 4th quint is 85k. They pay ~15k in fed taxes. So they take home 70k (ignore state for this for easy math). the General surgeon therefore works the equivalent of 2 jobs, and takes home <2.5X the pay of someone making 85k a year. That's a tiny increase for losing that much time. They also pay 4X the taxes. They work twice as hard, get paid 2.4X as much, and pay 6X the taxes. That Bush 5% is 10 grand. Sorry, but at 200k a year, 10k is a lot of money. It's not money you don't notice.
All the "rich" (most in fact) earn well under a million, and money is absolutely still "an object" to them (and they WORK, too. Hard). I call the real rich people who don't think about money when buying. That's maybe the top 1%. Maybe fewer.