I will probably never make close to $250,000 a year at any point in my life but I don’t want to jeopardize the people who do and who can afford to pay me to work for them. They’re the part of society that make donations and invest. That quality of life is really what Obama would want to make available to everyone but will take away once they’ve achieved it. Doesn’t that seem ugly?

Ughh! I will be so glad when this election is over: I will devote exactly one post to the results and then move on. Politicians are never very effective anyways.

Check out FactCheck.org’s analysis of the Wall Street Journal’s article:

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/obamas_welfare.html

Here’s an excerpt:

“Congressional Budget Office figures show that even those in the lowest-earning fifth of households pay an effective federal tax rate, on average, of 4.3 percent of their income, despite benefiting from existing federal refundable tax credits to a major degree. This group had average income of $15,900 in 2005, the most recent year for which CBO has done the calculations. But despite receiving ‘a federal check’ through the income tax system that boosted income by an average of 6.5 percent (this shows up as a negative tax rate in the CBO tables), they still paid an average of $600 in federal taxes. That’s true even after subtracting the effects of refundable tax credit ‘welfare.’”

I know from my own personal experience that in the days when I was super-duper poor I still paid taxes. And for a person that makes so little, even $600 in tax liability is still a lot of money. For a poor person, $600 might be a month of rent, or what it costs to get some prescription medication (remember that people that make minimum wage almost never receive health benefits). $600 is many weeks of child care that will allow that person to maintain employment.

I don’t *like* the idea that successful people feel punished for their success. But it is an indisputable fact that there are poor, suffering people in this country, and as it stands, the deck is stacked against them. It hurts everybody when people in our communities are losing their homes, and losing their jobs and losing their savings. I am reasonably well off now: I own my own house and I have a good job and I have health insurance. I wouldn’t mind paying a little more to help others. It doesn’t hurt me very much now that I’m successful, and as someone who has received public assistance, I know how much it helps.

Love you.