Are you sitting down? Obama plans to pay for his $3.6 trillion-dollar spending bill by raising taxes on “the rich.” I know, I know … I was pretty shocked, too.
The bad news is, by hiking taxes in a recession, Obama will turn a disaster into a catastrophe. But there’s good news, too. The “rich” are Obama supporters!
While liberals love being praised for their looks, their style, their brilliance and their courage, the one quality they don’t want talked about is their money. To the contrary, Democrats are constantly boasting about how poor they are — as if that’s a virtue in a capitalist society with no class barriers.
No matter how much money they have, liberals will be damned if they’re giving up the poor’s mantle of angry self-righteousness. This is especially true if their wealth came by inheritance, marriage or the taxpayer, the preferred sources of income for American liberals.
Democrats’ claims of poverty merely serve to show how out of touch they are with the average income in America.
At the Democratic National Convention, for example, there were heartfelt tributes to the daunting self-sacrifice of both Barack and Michelle Obama for passing up lucrative jobs to work in “public service” — which apparently is now defined, such as in Michelle Obama’s case, as “working as a ‘diversity coordinator’ at a big city hospital for $300,000 a year.”
How do people live on that?
Meanwhile, the average salary for a lawyer with 20 years or more experience in the U.S. is a little more than $100,000. If Michelle Obama doesn’t lay off all this “giving back” stuff pretty soon, she’s going to find herself in Warren Buffett’s tax bracket.
During the campaign, Joe Biden was also praised by the Democrats for being the poorest U.S. senator — as if that were a major accomplishment.
Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, touted Biden as “a good example of a working-class kid,” adding that, to this day, Biden was “one of the least wealthy members of the U.S. Senate.” Only a Democrat would list “never really made much of myself” on his resume.
On the Huffington Post, operated by a woman who acquired her wealth by marrying a rich gay guy connected to Big Oil, liberal blogger Steven Clemons gloated that, unlike John McCain, Biden wouldn’t “forget the number of houses he owns,” adding that, in 2006, Biden was ranked the poorest U.S. senator.
(At his high school reunion Biden was voted “most likely to try to bum a ride off of somebody.” Go Biden!)
According to tax returns for Biden and his public schoolteacher wife, in 2006, their total income was $248,459. In 2007, it was $319,853. That puts the couple in the top 1 percent of all earners in the U.S.
This, my friends, is the face of poverty in America. The national median household income was $48,201 in 2006 and $50,233 in 2007. Working for the government pays well.
If liberals are going to empathize with normal Americans by demanding a Marxist revolution against the rich every time they control the government, how about taking a peek at the charitable giving of these champions of the little guy?
According to their tax returns, in 2006 and 2007, the Obamas gave 5.8 percent and 6.1 percent of their income to charity. (I guess Michelle Obama has to draw the line someplace with all this “giving back” stuff.) The Bidens gave 0.15 percent and 0.31 percent of the income to charity.
No wonder Obama doesn’t understand the big fuss about his decision to limit tax deductions for charitable giving. That part of his tax plan won’t affect him or his supporters.
Meanwhile, in 1991, 1992 and 1993, George W. Bush had an income of $179,591, $212,313 and $610,772. His charitable contributions those years were $28,236, $31,914 and $31,292. During his presidency, Bush gave away more than 10 percent of his income each year.
For purposes of comparison, in 2005, Barack Obama made $1.7 million — more than twice President Bush’s 2005 income of $735,180 — but they both gave about the same amount to charity.
That same year, the heartless Halliburton employee Vice President Dick Cheney gave 77 percent of his income to charity. The following year, in 2006, Bush gave more to charity than Obama on an income one-third smaller than Obama’s. Maybe when Obama talks about “change” he’s referring to his charitable contributions.
Liberals have no intention of actually parting with any of their own wealth or lifting a finger to help the poor. That’s for other people to do with what’s left of their incomes after the government has taken its increasingly large cut.
As the great liberal intellectual Bertrand Russell explained while scoffing at the idea that he would give to charity: “I’m afraid you’ve got it wrong. (We) are socialists. We don’t pretend to be Christians.”
COPYRIGHT 2009 ANN COULTER
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