http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2 ... ddle-class
Is $250,000 a year in household income “middle class”?
That sort of income puts a family in the top 5 percent of American earners, which seems like an overgenerous definition of “middle class.” Why, then, are Democrats so allergic to raising taxes on people who make less than this fabled cutoff? Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders want to spend money on a lot of stuff: single-payer health care, more generous Social Security benefits, universal preschool, free college, worker training. They are probably not going to be able to pay for it with the piddly sums one can raise from even large tax hikes on the very highest earners. Yet both of them seem wedded to the idea that taxes should not rise significantly for anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year.
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Oh, I know: Many urban progressives say they’re willing to pay higher taxes. But my anecdotal experience of talking to them is that they think they’d be kicking a few thousand more a year into the collective kitty, not they’d be willing to see their personal income reduced by, say, 15 percent in perpetuity. That would make it challenging for them to pay the sizeable mortgages they have assumed -- mortgages that would not shrink just because their tax bill had gone up.
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So why are Democrats paying so much attention to the interests of high-but-not-astoundingly-so-income voters, rather than the lower-income folk who swing decisively in their favor?
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I can propose a couple of answers to this. The first is that Democrats never got over their reputation as the party of tax hikers, and what it did to them in the 1980s. They regrouped, rebranded as “the party of hiking taxes on really rich people who stole it all from the rest of you anyway” and came back to Clintonesque victories. There’s no appetite for trying again to be “the party of taxing everyone, a lot.”
The second is that those affluent-but-pinched progressive folks in coastal cities may not be a large fraction of the electorate, but they are a huge fraction of two very important groups: the professional political class, and the media.
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That might mean negative coverage for your shiny new plan. Far better for politicians to propose wonderful new programs piecemeal, paying for all of them with the same handful of popular-sounding tax hikes on financial firms and wealthy people, than to develop a comprehensive progressive agenda, and a comprehensive progressive tax plan to go with it.
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What this suggests is that we probably won’t see Democrats brave the sub-$250,000 tax hike until they absolutely have to. Which also suggests that if we have a Democratic president, all those expensive policy promises are likely to be either deficit financed, or dead-on-arrival.
Now two days old) that was outfitted with a private bathroom and a TV with HBO, and it was not hard at all to imagine the cost of all that space and luxury gets amortized into everyone's bills.
The ambulance wasn't covered by my insurance. Weeks later, when the hospital called me on the phone to request payment, they offered me a 50% discount if I paid immediately using a debit card. I gladly accepted their offer.
