No one is going to sing Kumbaya for someone earning $200,000, $400,000, $600,000 a year, but that doesn’t mean you lay down and accept the pummeling. Before I get to an action plan, I’m going to sum up the “Crushing of the Upper-Middle Class” (UMC) to fire you up. Political policy over the decades has led to a redistribution of wealth in the middle class, taking from those who make $250,000 a year and giving to those who make $150,000, and taking from those who make $400,000 a year and giving to those who make $50,000. This pancaking of the middle classes has largely left the two extremes, the poor and the very wealthy, untouched. Furthermore, the flattening has occurred in a stealthy and complex way, 1 and through so many different tax, revenue, and rejiggering schemes that it’s hard to place the blame on a single source. Why is so much pain targeted towards and incurred by a specific economic segment?
Well, if we learned anything from the 2012 presidential election, [Read more…] about WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
- Just think of the tax policymakers surrounding George W. who were fully cognizant that the highly touted reduction to the dividend and l-t capital gain down to 15% wouldn’t hold true for the UMC after they were put through the AMT. For revenue neutral reasons, they opted not to put through a patch, thus delivering a screwing to a particular group [↩]