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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1045707)	12/30/2017 10:20:36 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574098

What turned you from liberal to conservative? Elisabeth Arian, Freelance QA Tester (2017-present) Answered Dec 23 It was a cool March evening in 2015. I was 23 years old and a newly promoted project manager. Responsibilty—what we now call adulting—still felt strange and heavy to me then. I had these massive websites to get translated and I felt like I was better suited to getting someone coffee. My husband and I were emerging from the relative deprivation that marked the early years of our marriage. We were teetering on the brink of the middle class. Over the last year we’d worked long hours and multiple jobs. We had gone from empty bank accounts to almost seven thousand in savings. We were about to pay off one car and start paying off student loans. Both from working-class homes where money was tight, we were moving up in the world. I’d had a long day at the office. When we met downtown at six, I was already worn down. We walked to the local H&R Block. Laid everything out on the table. We knew we’d underpayed our taxes in 2014. It was the first year we made an income well above the poverty line, the first year I wasn’t a student. My husband was a freelancer. Neither of us knew anything about self-employment taxes. But we had no idea just how much we’d owe. A solitary man sat behind a desk in the dimly lit office. He shuffled our stack of W2s, looked at his computer screen and shook his head. “Why didn’t you have health insurance last year?” It was too expensive and the deductible too high to keep us from bankruptcy. “Why didn’t you have more withheld?” We didn’t know. Who teaches young poor kids about progressive taxation and small business accounting? “I don’t even want to tell you how much you’ll owe on the federal.” I started to cry. The accountant stared blankly at his computer, seemingly impervious. A few minutes later, we stumbled out of the office and walked silently along the riverbank. The river, the trail, the darkened sky, even reality itself seemed to spin. Everything we’d worked and saved for that year. Our dream of being debt-free, of joining the ranks of the middle class. Gone. Apparently, it had never been ours to begin with. Not long after, we filed our 2014 taxes and wrote a check to the IRS that cleared out our savings account. Self-employment taxes, the ACA “shared responsibility” penalty for my husband, and an underpayment penalty (yes, that’s a thing). There is one glass ceiling that we don’t talk about much. It’s not based on gender, color or sexual orientation, but it is real and important. It is the invisible barrier between poverty and prosperity, and on that quiet spring night my husband and I rammed our heads hard against it. This is a problem with the sort of progressive, high-tax, high-intervention government that liberals favor. It arguably helps those members of the underclass who cannot or do not want to move up. And on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, the wealthy can insulate themselves from progressive policies, even as they give lip service to those same policies. But what happens to those of us in between? What about those of us too rich for Medicaid and food stamps, but too poor for tax shelters and lobbyists? What about those of us who will never get unionized public-sector jobs, and are trying to improve our lot through self-employment and small-scale entrepreneurship? What about the single parent who wants to break the cycle of intergenerational welfare dependency and raise her children to be self-sufficient? Progressive taxation and redistribution are supposed to improve social mobility. But too often, they reinforce existing class lines by incentivizing the wrong behaviors and punishing the right ones. Getting married, taking a second job, working longer hours, or doing freelance work on the side are all good decisions that result in paying more taxes and qualifying for less assistance. For families trying to lift themselves out of poverty, taking such positive steps often results in less income because the extra income does not make up for lost welfare benefits.