the other half
Meet the Smiths; they live in a small house with barely two rooms, not even 700 square feet. Tom works for a bank and Mary works at a local doctors office. Tom spends roughly 60 hours a week at work just to comfortably get by, and Mary has to take the bus to work because the Smiths can’t afford a car. They just had a baby and she sleeps in the living room because they only have one bedroom. Like most American families the Smiths have very little savings, they spend most of their paycheck on housing and paying off student loans, and if one of them lost a job they would not know how to get by.
Did I mention that the Smiths work and live in Manhattan, Tom is a manager for an investment bank and Mary is a partner in a small medical group. Combined they make $275,000 a year. Mary has $175,000 in student loans, and Tom has almost finished paying off his $50,000 bill. They can’t afford a car because it costs $400 a month for a parking spot, not to mention insurance and car payments. They spend $2000 a month in daycare, $3000 a month in mortgage payments for an apartment that can fit inside the average middle class kitchen, and on top of that they pay another $1200 a month in co-op maintenance fees.
When they want to celebrate a special occasion their average restaurant bill comes to $120 for the two of them and a movie with pop corn another $35.
And because of all this Tom and Mary have been defined as rich by Barack Obama, and as a result they will now be paying thousands of dollars more in federal and state taxes next year. Sorry Smiths, but you earn too much, there are a lot of people in 10,000 square foot houses with two cars and bad credit who need your money to subsidize their defaulting mortgages.