Presidential Politics and the Middle Class
I was listening to Mitt Romney on TV and something he brought up made me do a little research. He of course believes that by cutting more taxes on corporations he will create more jobs. Those corporations won’t take that money and still outsource jobs. He trusts the kenneth Lays of the world much more than I do.
But he also said something about cutting taxes for the middle class, (sounds great hunh?), but then followed it up with how people who make $200,000 per year or less would benefit from his “middle-class” tax credits he wants to put in place.
If you ask almost anyone they will tell you they are the middle class. At least it seems they all want to be considered middle class. Then some divide it up into upper middle class and lower middle class.
I think Romney must have a new category, the super middle class and they make $200,000 per year.
To be fair, Romney is not the only politician that stretches who is or is not in poverty or in the middle class. It allows them to say things like Romney said today. It allows them to say they are for helping the middle class. They are . . . as long as they get to redefine what the middle class is and what the poverty level is.
Hillary Clinton wanted to expand health care. She said it was for the poor in this country. The poor children of this country. However her plan went to people who earned almost $90,000 per year. So they all do it.
The median income of this country is right around $48,000 per year. That’s the national average for income. The poverty level is almost $20,000 per year. So if you earn more than $20,000 per year and less than $48,000 per year, you are basically the lower middle class.
But how far can you stretch the upper middle class? To $80,000 per year? $100,000? I would say anything over $100,000 per year and you aren’t middle class.
Of course there are other factors. The poverty level for a single person is almost $10,000 per year while the $20,000 per year mark applies to a family of 4. But no matter how you slice it, if you earn over $100,000 per year, no matter how many kids you decide to have, you are not part of the middle class.
I wish these politicians would quit misleading people into believing that they are for the middle class while giving tax cuts and claiming to want health insurance for the poor while actually giving it to the upper middle class.
Romney says giving more tax cuts to corporations will get them to create more jobs. He admits that some corporations will take the tax cuts and still not add more jobs, but he claims most of them will.
Bush said something similar when he wanted to refund 15 years of backtaxes back to corporations. When he was asked to put strings on those tax refunds that the corporations who received them would have to create specific numbers of jobs, he said no way, those american corporations would “do the right thing”.
They don’t do the right thing. I’m all for giving these corporations a tax break for creating jobs. For every American Citizen they hire full time and pay them a living wage and provide health insurance for, they get a tax break.
Stumble it!