Thursday, July 7, 2011

$150,000 is a lot of F***ing Money Outside of a Half Dozen Metropolitan Areas

Oliver Willis flags a PPP poll showing that people are more interested in raising taxes on high-income earners than previously thought. In fact, raising taxes on households earning as "little" as $150,000 has wide popularity. There's not enough money to eliminate the entire deficit through this sort of tax increase, but this sort of policy is dramatically more popular than cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or education.

Because such a large number of the major news-producing figures tend to be rich, and tend to live in areas of the coutnry where lots of people who make six figures don't "feel" rich, the fact that this kind of money allows one to live an extremely comfortable lifestyle outside in almost the entire country can be a little obscured. Also obscured is the fact that socio-economic stratification means that most non-rich people have few to no rich friends, so asking them about this sort of tax is almost on par with asking them about a tax on hotels; it's not going to affect them at all.

No comments: