Comments on mentalblog.com: Kerry Tax Rate: 12.8%

You are the one creating a "hypocrisy" out of "por...

2004-10-12T09:03:00.000-04:00

You are the one creating a "hypocrisy" out of "portrayal."

The reality is that one candidate has promised to raise taxes for millionaires.

The other has embraced an agenda that would reduce Kerry's taxes all the way to zero, by eliminating taxes on unearned income.

One candidate pretends to be middle-class but keeps his upper-class interests front and center.

The other -- who despite being in the billionaire category today actually did at one point work for a living -- follows in the tradition of rich people woh are "class traitors." See, for example, my comments at the time of my grandfather z'l's death.

Stop looking at appearances and pay attention to content. Al tistakel b'kankan eleh mah she-yesh bo.

Bush paid 30%. The point of this note ultimately i...

2004-10-11T23:14:00.000-04:00

Bush paid 30%. The point of this note ultimately is Kerry's hypocrisy. A windsurfing man, married a millionaire woman 5 years older than himself. And he goes around and talks about poor people. Give me a break. And then there is a plainspoken, chainsaw playing cowboy who married a librarian, is being portrayed as the enemy #1 of the middle class.

Of course Kerry paid a lower marginal rate than yo...

2004-10-11T22:53:00.000-04:00

Of course Kerry paid a lower marginal rate than you did. So did Bush and Clinton.

That is the whole point of the opposition to the Bush tax cuts -- they lower the rates of the richest, giving them billions of dollars borrowed from our children, while giving bupkiss to the working stiffs. (That I got a few hundred dollars of my taxes cut was despite the Administration, which opposed the Democrat-sponsored cut for medium and low-income workers).

I'm not going to repeat the whole sorry saga of the Bush tax cuts, which I railed against on my blog (http://www.shmoozenet.com/yudel) as they were happening. With payroll tax, someing making around 60k a year is paying a marginal rate of 14% (payroll) plust 28% (income) which comes to about 42%. (disclaimer: I'm not looking up the exact figures, so I may be off by a couple of points.).

But when you reach the payroll cap, somewhere under $100k, all you pay is income. Which comes to the low 30%s.

The other point -- which all the economists argued before the cuts were passed -- was that spreading the tax cuts around to the middle income would produce more economic stimulus than would leveraging them toward the millionaires. By the same token, to lift us out of a recession, the cuts should have been front-loaded, costing most during the recession, so as to be temporary deficit spending -- not the increasing deficit spending the president wants.