It's Not Class Warfare, It's Math

Famous last words of a SCOAMF:

But last week, we had a separate vote on a part of the jobs bill that would put 400,000 teachers, firefighters and police officers back on the job, paid for by asking people who make more than $1 million to pay one-half of 1 percent in additional taxes. For somebody making $1.1 million a year, that’s an extra $500. Five hundred bucks. And with that, we could have saved 400,000 jobs.

Most people making more than $1 million, if you talk to them, they’ll say, I’m willing to pay $500 extra to help the county. They’re patriots. They believe we’re all in this thing together. But all the Republicans in the Senate said no. (Emphasis added).

Occidental? Columbia? Hah-vahd?

To which one of these fine institutions of higher learning do we owe our gratitude for foisting upon the nation a stuttering clustef*ck of a math failure? Or maybe we should spread the wealth and just blame them all, along with his typical white bank vice-president grandmother.

With apologies for the "no math" rule here at the HQ: $1,100,000 x 0.5% = $5,500*

$5,500. Not $500. But what's an order of magnitude between friends now that trillion is the new billion?

But it gets worse:

But even if the president meant to say $5,500, his math continues to pose some challenges. According to the IRS, a total of 235,413 taxpayers earned more than $1 million last year. If each “was willing to pay $[5,]500 extra to help the country,” that would generate only $1.3 billion in revenue — approximately what the federal government spends every three hours. Wouldn’t it be just as patriotic for President Obama to turn off the federal spigot for three hours and dedicate the savings to funding those 400,000 jobs?

... not to mention all the rapes that would be prevented.

Speaking of which, it looks like ol' Slow Joe had the same talking point. If he'd have given them enough detail, I'm sure one of the 4th graders would've called him on it.

* Update: It could be that the half-percent tax only applies to the amount in excess of $1 million, so the $500 in his example would be right (yet still disingenuous). It just exacerbates the second point in that we're not talking about a whole lot of dough here in comparison to what the government spends.

posted by Andy at 08:38 PM

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