> Still lower class: you still can't afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. Yes, that was what middle-class people used to do.
This is a complete delusion designed to justify affluent people asserting they’re “middle class.” Americans never lived like that. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, most people didn’t even go to college. They lived in a house with half the square footage, but more people in the household. If they got cancer, they just died.
The problem isn’t republicans, or not just republicans. The problem is that Democrats also refuse to raise taxes on the top 25% above the current Reagan-era lows. Every other developed economy functions by heavily taxing the top 25%. Even in the US, that group earns the plurality of income. What makes the American tax structure unusual isn’t the absence of wealth taxes or low capital gains or corporate tax rates. It’s incredibly low tax rates on upper middle class people. What makes America unusual is that affluent professionals identify as beleaguered members of the “bottom 99%” instead of acknowledging that they are the people that must be taxed to pay for the social services they claim to want.
You know why many Americans are on the edge of medical bankruptcy? It’s not because we don’t have wealth taxes on billionaires. Sweden doesn’t have that either. Neither does Germany or France or Spain or Italy. The reason is because of the incredibly low taxes paid by Facebook engineers, doctors, lawyers, and other white collar professionals. My au pair paid about the same tax rate in Germany, with an entry level desk job (40%) as my double private practice lawyer household in Maryland. That’s because the second to highest tax rate (42% versus the top 45%) kicks in at the equivalent of $70,000/year. In Sweden, the top tax rate kicks in at 1.5x the median income (under $100,000 in the US).