People think of New York City as a Democratic juggernaut, despite the fact that the city hasn’t had a Democratic mayor since 1993, Bill Clinton’s first year in office. It’s true that the Democrats control all of the cities seats in the House of Representatives, but that only became true this year when city councilman Mike McMahon won the Staten Island seat in the aftermath of revelations that the incumbent, Vito Fossella, had a secret second family in Virginia. Staten Island is a lot like metro Detroit in that it combines a lot of hard-working middle class people with culturally conservative values with a lot of millionaires. In the absence of scandal and presidential incompetence, the seat would be reliably Republican in most years.
That’s why you get a quote like this from Rep. McMahon.
“I spend all my time [in Congress] making the case that the profile of the rich doesn’t stand in my district,” Mr. McMahon said. “People feel that they’re getting hit from all sides.”
In other words, he doesn’t want a surtax on the uber-wealthy to pay form national health care. And Rep. McMahon is joined by a quite a few other newly-minted Democratic representatives who are serving in affluent suburbs. The Democrats won these districts largely because of the Southern cultural swing of the Republicans during the latter half of the Gingrich Revolution. Tom DeLay and Bill Frist didn’t sell in Greenwich, Connecticut or Northern Virginia, but those are the two richest areas of the country.
Rep. McMahon is right that money doesn’t go as far on Staten Island as it does in most of the rest of the country, but that doesn’t alleviate him from his duty as a Democrat to help the president pass his health care agenda in a fiscally responsible way. That means the bill must be paid for. Who does McMahon think is going to pay for it if not the super-wealthy?
First of all, I’m not going to cry about raising taxes on couples making over 350k / year. But I think the overall point is a valid one, and it raises an interesting question : with the ease of access to copious amounts of data that we have and the sheer speed of computation, why are we still writing legislation assuming we don’t know anything and can’t figure anything out?
By that I mean why use set income levels for calculating tax rates when we could instead use income as a percent of average cost of living for your area? If you make 500% of the average cost of living for your area, maybe you pay 1% surtax for health care…600%, you pay 1.2%, etc, etc.
Maybe the reason we don’t do things that way is that it just sounds more complicated to the average joe and our tax code is already nightmarish enough. But it drives me nuts that we have all this information and haven’t seemed to figure out how to use it yet.
good point in the abstract, but imagine the infighting that would cause in Congress. It’s bad enough that states sabotage each other in a race to be the most tax and corporate friendly. If you take it to definable population centers, you’ve really got problems.
Taxes are taxes no matter where they come from. I do not want a road out here to keep up, no do I want a family oput here that I do not know to pay for their insurance. I will pay my taxes to keep the roads and insurances of all ppl’s and roads as the government sees fit. I have worked many many years in the force and I feel my taxes are just. they do keep, however, going up almost every years, depending on how much I make that particular year. This why I am now in a position of not working any overtime like I use to do. The old saying the more you make, the more they take. Besides, I am getting too old to do much more work than I am already doing…;o)
Good to see you Ew
how rural is your part of Tennessee?