by They say that one of the most dangerous places to be in Washington, DC, is between Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and a microphone. And what he’s said recently has found me actually agreeing this him—to a point:
Menendez, Lautenberg and Kirsten Gillibrand support eliminating some or all of the Bush tax cuts. Schumer said the $250,000 limit is unacceptable since it will hit the metropolitan area disproportionately because of the high cost of living here.
“$250,000 makes you really rich in Mississippi but it doesn’t make you rich at all in New York and there ought to be some kind of scale based on the cost of living on how much you pay,” Schumer said. [Democrat Want to Pick and Choose Which Millionaires Get a Tax Hike]
This is one of the points that I’ve been making quite a while off-line—that placing arbitrary numbers on people for taxes is unfair because what you really should be concerned about is buying power.
My friend lives on the West Coast. When I told him what I paid for my first house, he told me that he would have to pay two to three times that amount to get the house that I could buy with much less. Of course, he’s also making more money. There’s no way he could commute.
Should he be taxed at a higher rate?
I mean, President Obama is making a big deal about “The Buffet Rule” but even the AP called him out on that one:
The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
How much is “your fair share”? By this accounting, I believe that the “class” that’s not paying their share is actually opposite what Pres. Obama states—it’s the poor and middle class less than $60,000 that aren’t paying anything! Hard to be “paying your fair share” when you pay nothing, isn’t it?
