Ted, Not to worry......Kerry swore he will only go up against the top two percent which, of course, includes him and his wife.
Kerry has a long history of flipping or at least sitting on the fence. He reiterated his dividing line of $200K last night, but who's to say that the line won't be lowered to, say, $150K? Or $100K? And is that $200K cutoff for married couples, or is it for single people and married people filing separately?
In any case, here's the whole point. I'm not very fond of a government that decides for me whether I need all of the money I'm making or not. I'm a rather frugal guy, so when I was single, it wasn't hard to end up making more money than I could spend. So I saved and invested my money, plus I gave rather generously to charities. I've always wondered whether the government was actually making good use of the 1/3 that they took out of every paycheck, but hey, no worries as long as the money keeps coming in, right?
Now I'm married, and all of my savings have gone toward, well, wedding and marriage stuff, plus a new home. I'm still on a single income now as my wife was working on getting her pharmacist's license. Fortunately the government now takes much less from my paycheck than before, but that's cold comfort as our expenses are much higher now than I ever imagined them to be.
Yeah, I know, moving from Portland to Orange County and getting married shortly after that are the major reasons. But still, had I been taxed at this lower rate while I was single, I would have had more money saved up for this phase of my life. Unfortunately, government had already decided that while I was single, I could not be trusted to save my money and put it to good use. Now I'm married, so the government now figures I could use more of the money I earn every year. Geez, why wasn't I allowed to save as much money as I could while I was single?
Well, pretty soon my wife will start working, and we'll come close to Kerry's cut-off point for the "rich," assuming that point stays where he originally promised it would be. But then my wife isn't sure she wants to continue working after we get our first child, so that means most of the money we'll be earning as DINKs (dual-income, no kids) will be used to pay off debts and build up a savings account. Unfortunately, the government will consider us "rich" for those DINK years of ours, which means our ability to save for the future will be curtailed.
Do you see the point? My wife and I are hardly "super-rich," but we'd sure like to be. But here we are, living the American dream and taking advantage of all the opportunities that are offered us. We know that no one is just going to hand us a pot of gold, so we're going to save and invest whatever we can so that we and our future kids can live a life worth working for. But of course, a big chunk of our discretionary income will always be decided by the class warriors who decide for us whether we're "winning life's lottery" or not. It's as if we owe society a favor for being where we are. Try telling that to my wife face-to-face; I'm sure you'll get a rather colorful reaction. ;-)
So you can imagine how I feel when people accuse me of not being generous, or even worse, not being Christian enough, because I know in my heart that I've made the right decisions and I'm doing the right things in life. And I'll vote for people who encourage making the right decisions over those who decide for me because they determined that I don't need my money, or that my vote is worth less than that of the "working poor."
Tenchusatsu |
