Chelsea, Get A Real Job and Pay More Taxes
by Big Dog on Feb 20, 2008 at 19:06 Political
Monica Lewinsky’s boyfriend’s wife said that hedge fund managers aren’t doing real work during a round table discussion. This must come as a shock to Chelsea Clinton who works for a hedge fund where I am sure she feels she works pretty hard. It is amazing that Hillary Clinton would tell people she has been a mother longer than a politician after the suggestion she was pimping out her daughter and then say her daughter does not do real work. This is another example of how Hillary will say and do anything, including pimping out and insulting her own daughter, to get elected.
Hillary was trying to pander for votes by telling people that Wall Street investment managers who make 50 million dollars on actually pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than do people who make 50 thousand a year. This is a patent lie. If we take a 50k income and assume married filing joint with 2 children and the taxes paid are about $3,073 or 6%. This assumes no itemized deductions.
A person who makes 10 million dollars1 (one fifth the amount she cited in her remarks) with the same assumptions pays $3,466,874 or 34.67% in taxes. We can assume that the 50 million dollar earner will stay at the 35% range and pay significantly more in total dollars. Of course these folks might not get their income in dollars. They might get it in stock in which case there is no disposable income and they have to pay taxes on the dividends. Even with itemized deductions there is no way the millionaire pays less in percentage than the 50k a year worker. Given that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will probably kick in it is unlikely that the millionaire will have many itemized deductions.
Hillary told a lie because she knows there are many people who will believe this crap. It is classic class warfare and it is shameful. Additionally, Hillary Clinton is a millionaire and has refused to release her income tax reports. Is this because she has found a way to pay far less in taxes than most (percentage wise)? Is she citing herself as the proof of her claim? If Hillary is paying less in taxes than she thinks she should be why does she not send money to the treasury? As I pointed out before, they take donations.
Hillary is not the only Democrat to play this game and she will not be the last. They all talk about tax cuts for the rich as if there is such thing as tax cuts for the poor. The bottom 40% of wage earners pay absolutely no taxes so how could their taxes possibly be cut at all. The tax cuts affected all people who pay taxes and since the top 25% of wage earners pay 84% of the taxes in this country, they are going to be the ones who benefit from a tax cut (notice that even the bottom 50% of earners get a 0.5% benefit from tax cuts even though they pay less than 4% of the nation’s income taxes). It is very simple but the masses do not seem to understand this and politicians like Hillary are more than happy to exploit the ignorance.
How do tax cuts benefit those who pay no taxes? There is more income for those who do and they are the class that creates jobs. Additionally, those who pay no taxes benefit from government services used. These folks use a far greater amount of those services than they pay for (since they are not paying taxes) and the tax payers use far fewer of those services. Everyone is eligible for the same government benefits regardless of what they paid.
In reality though, the tax payers are not entitled to as much even though they pay more. Wealthy people who retire cannot draw Social Security because their retirement income is too high, however they still pay Social Security all their working lives. If Social Security were privatized a great number of the working class would actually retire with a decent amount of money and not have to rely on the government to survive. Of course, the government does not want this because they need to control people to retain power.
Liberals realize this and this is why they engage in class warfare. They like to pretend they are just like the rest of us but like most politicians from either party, they are wealthy. None of them understand how it is to actually work for a living and the feeling of living paycheck to paycheck. The real dirty little secret is that all these folks who want to tax the rich work real hard to pay as little as they can to the IRS.
Chelsea must really feel good knowing that her mother thinks she does not have a real job. Maybe the fact that mommy dearest sent her to Hawaii to campaign took a bit of the sting out of the slap but it had to hurt nonetheless.
It would be interesting to see how many hedge fund managers donated money to Hillary. It would be even more interesting if they asked for it back.
Sources:
National Taxpayer’s Union
Tax Foundation
1The tax calculator I used only allows an income up to 10 million dollars to be entered. It must not have been designed for hedge fund managers or members of Congress.
Tags: amt, chelsea clinton, hedge fund, Hillary, pandering, real work, taxes
[…] Get A Real Job and Pay More Taxes February 20th, 2008 Elise Hu wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAdditionally, Hillary Clinton is a […]
I think her point is fairly valid. What I do is technically “real work” just like a hedge fund employee. But when you compare that to other work sectors it doesn’t seem all that much like real work. The point remains that the bedrock of our nation lies in the labor of the lower and middle class Americans. I think you would agree that the upper percents may pay most of the taxes, but the lower percent does the work that keeps this nation running.
It’s not the poor that Democrats want to target with tax cuts, it’s the middle class. The middle class has seen the largest increase in tax burden in the last few decades.
Adam’s last blog post..March 4 Soon, Please
Sorry Adam, the middle class is in that lower 50% that only pays 3% of the nation’s taxes. The bulk of the taxpayers and those paying the highest rate are the ones in the higher income levels. No matter how you slice it, there has been no increase in middle class taxes and since the middle class does not pay anywhere near as much in taxes as the upper earners, they 1) are not burdened by taxes and 2) are not going to see much benefit from the cuts.
All work is work. She did not say physical labor she said it is not real work. However, given your spin of what she said then what she does is not real work so why do we need her? It is the lower and middle class that labors but it is the upper class that makes the jobs. Government does not create private sector jobs, people in the private sector do.
The middle class is commonly referred to as families with incomes from 25k to 100k a year. The top 10% of wage earners starts at 103k a year. They pay 70% of the taxes in this country. The lower 90% pay 30% of the taxes.
The people making 62-103k pay 16%, 30-62 11% and below 30k 3% (half of all wage earners). The top 1%, 5% and 10% pays 39%, 60% and 70% respectively. There is still no logical way to say the middle class has seen the largest increase, especially when their tax rates went down under all the tax cuts.
This is all mindless political prattle. Unless you can show how their taxes have increased then I am afraid the middle class tax burden is another urban legend created by liberals intent of playing class warfare.
Studies of the Bush tax cuts alone show the tax burden shifted slightly upward according to a CBO study. I’m not talking about anything dramatic, but just suggesting that taxes on the middle class increase slightly faster than lower and upper class taxes. I didn’t think that’s any secret or anything to argue about, but I’m probably wrong about that…
Adam’s last blog post..March 4 Soon, Please
Well a 1% increase or decrease is going to look very drastic to people making a lot of money based on the raw dollars.
The figures I gave came from the IRS and it showed a 0.5% drop. Either way, the reality is that the bottom 50% pay less than 4% of the nation’s taxes.