Tuesday, October 28, 2008

He who must be punished

From CNN/Money: "Look who pays for the bailout"

Bill Kwon is the embodiment of the American dream. His father - who was arrested by North Korean Communists in the early 1950s for championing democracy - brought the family from Seoul to Illinois when he was a baby. Bill worked himself ragged pursuing every opportunity America's heartland offered, never leaving Peoria.

Just out of college, he was earning a six-figure salary at a telecom company and sleeping in his parents' basement. Now he's a wealth advisor earning $375,000 at Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500), with a five-bedroom brick home, a minivan, a son in private school, and three younger kids to follow. "My dad never made more than $25,000 a year," says the burly, outgoing Kwon, 39. "When I was a kid, this was the top neighborhood in Peoria. I never thought I could live here."

For all his blessings, Kwon gets really steamed when politicians and pundits claim that he and other Americans in his income group aren't shouldering their "fair share" in taxes and should pay more. Nor does he appreciate being branded as "rich" when it's far from certain he'll ever build the kind of lavish nest egg the truly wealthy enjoy, especially after the current market meltdown. "I'm not a trust-fund baby," says Kwon. "Raising taxes for people at my income level is like being punished for success, for working hard." Kwon's total tax bill is already more than $100,000, and the bite is taking an ever-rising share of his raises and bonuses, not to mention his wife's income as a photographer. Kwon fears that America risks killing the incentive for people like him by shrinking the rewards for logging extra hours or starting a business, diminishing the dream that brought his father from Korea.
I suspect for every Paris Hilton that is caricatured as a symbol of the indolent rich, there are ten Bill Kwons who pursued the American dream and now the government is going to (forcibly) reap the rewards of their hard work. Hard to believe, but sometimes "well-off" Americans and "working" Americans aren't mutually exclusive classes.

Extra – First they taxed the "rich" and I didn't speak up because I didn't make $250K. And then....

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, the individual personality profile. The life's blood of lazy-ass journalism.

How come we never get a Civil War history as filtered through the tired eyes of Miss Thelma Ferguson, a hard-working schoolteacher in Fairfax, Virginia?

I wonder who'll be standing up in the balcony next to Mrs. President at next year's State of the Union?

Anonymous said...

Well, typically if I note that the top 1% of taxpayers pay a little more than a third of all income tax and the top 5% pay a little more than half, the response I'll get is: "Bill Gates can afford it!"

It's not a matter of affordability, it's a matter of fairness.

Do you know why healthcare is so expensive in the U.S.? It's because most Americans don't see the real cost of treatment so they really don't care. Right now, 40% of all Americans pay no income tax. What's going to happen when that tips over 50%?

We'll have an expanding government paid for by a shrinking pool of taxpayers. This is the unavoidable trend.

Anonymous said...

There's simply no better way to demonstrate the scope of a national trend than to handpick a single example.

"Because if this plan affects 0.00000000333% of us like THIS, just IMAGINE how it will impact the whole country!"

But what if... gasp... the other side finds an individual who fits THEIR preferred rhetorical outcome? This is how the Cold War policy of mutual deterrence started. We must not allow a Some Guy gap!

skeneogden said...

My prediction: Obama's tax plan will trickle down to the middle class, but in a perverse way. Once he finds out that you can't get everything you want just by taxing people who make over $250,000 the bar will drop a little at a time until many who voted for him will feel the pain and pain is the great equalizer. Now that's democracy!

Anonymous said...

The moment the Bush tax cuts expire, we return to the 2000 tax table unadjusted for inflation. We all get a tax increase.

Anonymous said...

At least we can look forward to successful national healthcare system following the example of ...

Ummmm. Well we can look forward to higher taxes, and watching others suffer because of it. I mean, as long as its not me, who cares right?