Bloodthirsty Liberal

Atlas is shrugging all over the place:

“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

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My wife and I are both teachers, so we are not nearly in the upper income brackets. However, I do some consulting on the side and the taxation on that income is unbelievable:

- 25% federal income tax
- 9.3% state income tax
- 7.65% self-employed Social Security and Medicare tax
- 7.65% “employee” Social Security and Medicare tax

So I am paying a nearly 50% tax on the income from my little consulting business. 50%! So, to heck with this. I’m “going Galt” on my consulting.

(A side note: Most of my consulting has to do with training teachers to teach Advanced Placement classes. I don’t mean to sound self-absorbed, but I have a pretty strong reputation, and teachers report back that the training they have taken with me has helped their students to be far more successful on the challenging AP exams. But at this point, Michelle, I don’t care. I’m fed up. Let somebody else in my modest income bracket pay the federal government 50% of his/her earnings.)

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Three examples I personally know of:

1. I recently talked to a record shop owner, who had two shops, four employees, open seven days a week. He let go all four employees, closed one shop, is only open five days a week, and reduced hours at that. Result? Almost the same take-home, and greatly reduced blood pressure.

2. The owner of a small custom stained-glass shop, where I am currently taking a class, let one employee go because the additional income she brought in was not worth the added hassle.

3. I retired from a pretty good job at the end of last year, at the age of 61. I could easily have kept working, or found another job. With pension, and social security in a few months, my gross will be considerably less. But, after taxes are taken into account, the net is not all that much less. I figured that I was working in a pretty high-stress job, for little incremental income.

By the way, I have talked to other folks in similar positions, who have run the numbers in the same way I did. Most of them realize they are knocking themselves out for a few bucks an hour, but keep going out of inertia, or a sense of duty. But if things get even worse, as I suspect they will, expect more upper-middle-income to upper-income folks to quietly drop out.

Thereby achieving Obama’s goal of evening-out income. Others may not get much more, as long as some make much less.

Maybe the middle class need to form a union—to which Obama would have to pay obeisance, as he has all others. ‘Cause that’s the only way it’s going to happen.