Thursday, May 17, 2012

Could You Live On $188,000 a Year?

I'm going to talk about rich people.

Bear with me, I'm not going to attack them or anything. I just want to post a theory I have about rich people and why they don't want to pay even slightly more in taxes. I began really thinking about "the 1%" the last few days mainly because of Eduardo Severin could be making nearly 3 billion (3,000,000,000) dollars on Facebook when it goes public whenever that is. He has renounced his U.S. citizenship under the guise of he's living in Singapore now and doesn't plan on coming back to America anytime soon. Most everyone else has taken that as a sign that he just doesn't want to pay the $67 million in taxes he would owe on his three billion. I don't know about you but I'd be perfectly happy with $2,933,000,000. I could live off of that. As could most everybody else in the world.
Who knew this guy who looked like a douche
would turn out to be a douche.
But rich people never see it that way. And I think I've figured out why. Most of the rich people you see saying you can raise their taxes are celebrities and successful people with their own legitimate companies that constantly bring in money. People who are typically against it are politicians, "small" business owners, people who inherited their money and "successful" people who don't really have a real job (they work for a company but their role is a mystery). I think the reason those latter people don't want their taxes raised is because they are only rich in name only. Any money they make immediately goes into paying any debt they have accumulated since the last time they got paid and then into stocks, bonds, investments, etc. High-paid CEOs make millions every year but if they were fired, not given a golden parachute and could never get another job because they ran a once successful bank into the ground then their time being rich would be over. (In a perfect world anyway.)

They give off the illusion of being rich and yes, by the defined standards, they are rich but they buy everything on credit and any cash they receive go to paying down that credit so they can continue their illusion of being wealthy. Anyone can do it, it just depends on how big of a credit limit you can get. So if they are forced to pay higher taxes, that may cause an upset in the facade of their illusion. Sure, they can handle more money but less money? They have the illusion of a lifestyle to maintain so no thank you.
The Bluth family also had an illusion to maintain. Do you
want to be the Bluth family?
I know I am lumping a large group of people together and not everyone is like this. But I do think the anti-high tax people can be classified into certain groups: the ones I mention above (rich in name only), the ones who feel that since they work/ed hard they should not be "punished" and the truly greedy. My main point is that why do rich people feel they are being punished for being "successful" because they are asked to pay a little bit more in taxes? If you are making $280,000 a year and filing jointly with your spouse, that's $92,400. You are still netting $187,600 a year. Pretty sure I could live comfortably on that as well. Unless I had an illusion to maintain...
I could finally replace my car that has a failing transmission and whose window
won't roll back up.