{"id":9797,"date":"2012-01-22T11:41:37","date_gmt":"2012-01-22T16:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=9797"},"modified":"2012-01-22T12:47:41","modified_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:47:41","slug":"scott-brown-what-about-all-the-rich-schoolteachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/01\/22\/scott-brown-what-about-all-the-rich-schoolteachers\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Brown: What About All The Rich Schoolteachers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Talking Points Memo<\/em> has the article Scott Brown: What About All The Rich Schoolteachers?<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 It starts with the paragraph:<\/p>\n

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) made the case in Lowell, MA on Friday that letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire would create a burden for well-off teachers, firefighters, and police officers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The tenor of most of the comments was about how dumb Scott Brown is\u00a0 to not understand that there would be little burden to these public servants even for the tiny minority that did manage to earn incomes above $250,000.<\/p>\n

It is not Scott Brown who is too dumb to understand the concept of the higher marginal tax rates only applying to the part of the earnings that are above $250K.\u00a0 He knows that the people listening to him don’t understand.\u00a0 When he makes these comments, he is just reinforcing their misunderstanding to use for his advantage.<\/p>\n

When I was in college, I had a friend who was studying accounting.\u00a0 He was afraid that if he earned more money he would be in a higher tax bracket and would therefore take home less money.\u00a0 I never could explain to him the concept that there is no marginal tax rate that is above 100% which is what would be necessary for his nightmare scenario to be true.\u00a0 In other words for each extra dollar he earned in the new tax bracket, he would get to keep a large share of it after taxes.\u00a0 So his total income after taxes would increase for each extra dollar he earned.\u00a0 He wasn’t going to be richer by refusing a salary increase.<\/p>\n

I have been competely unsuccessful in explaining to the Warren campaign that she cannot just assume everyone will recognize the flaws in Brown’s ideas.\u00a0 He is spending a lot of time miseducating the voters.\u00a0 If she doesn’t spend a greater amount of time educating the voters, then she might lose.\u00a0 And even if she wins, she won’t be able to be an effective Senator because of all the misinformed voters that will not want her to do the things that need doing.\u00a0 Large numbers of middle-class people will be against her raising taxes on the wealthy, because of their flawed understanding of what that means.\u00a0 These people will be against regulating the banks because they mistakenly think it will be bad for the economy.\u00a0 These people will be against more economic stimulus because they mistakenly believe that raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for the stimulus will be bad for the economy.\u00a0 They mistakenly believe that higher taxes on the wealthy is penalizing success, when it is in fact penalizing the taking unfair advantage of the rest of us.<\/p>\n

Some of the wealthiest of the wealthy 1% made their money by vulture capitalism stealing the pension funds from the corporations they take over and then walking away from the debts they made the company incur in order to pay the vulture’s high earnings above what they took in pension funds. They also sold off all the company’s productive assets that were no longer needed after all the jobs had been shipped overseas.\u00a0 They got rich by all their schemes that made other people poor.\u00a0 This also had the salutary effect for these vultures of getting rid of the labor unions who might be strong enough to resist them.<\/p>\n

Others of this class made money by enticing unsuspecting homeowners to take out mortgages with low initial teaser interest rates, so that they would borrow more than they could really afford to when the interest rose to its final, real rate.\u00a0 These mortgage scammers then sold these mortgages to unsuspecting investors who were falsely given assurances that these were high quality mortgages.\u00a0 Moreover, the mortgages were valued as if the borrowers would eventually pay the higher interest rates, which the lenders were assuring the borrowers that they never would have to pay. When the trap was sprung, the borrowers lost their homes, the investors lost their investments, and the con artists walked away with huge profits. Of course the profits grew even more when the tax payers bailed out the banks and bankers that had done the scamming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Talking Points Memo has the article Scott Brown: What About All The Rich Schoolteachers?\u00a0 It starts with the paragraph: Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) made the case in Lowell, MA on Friday that letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire would create a burden for well-off teachers, firefighters, and police officers. The tenor of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9797"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9807,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9797\/revisions\/9807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}