But it's even worse than that in places. It's: I must keep my income below $249,999 so I don't have to pay higher tax on the whole thing. She thinks someone making $249,999 will take home more than someone making $250,001.
The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant "up or out" policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and, as Tigerhawk points out, in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife's former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.
The lawyers who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant "up or out" policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and, as Tigerhawk points out, in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in Britain. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife's former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.
I entirely agree with these sentiments. Get back to work, chatters!
This week it's drinking:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-1162268/MELANIE-PHILLIPS-Low-prices-Piffle-The-real-reason-rampant-drinking-Labours-24-hour-licensing-free-all.html
I'm dubious of her hospital admissions figure- if it were true, wouldn't she base her whole article on it?
Anyhow the key figure is the change since the modest licensing extension in 2005. She's very quiet on that.
Unlike some of the others on this thread, that one isn't nonsense from beginning to end. The point where she really reminds us she's a loon is:
More invidious still, there were positive benefits from creating an ever-widening client state, with the burgeoning numbers of problem drinkers, gambling addicts and the myriad casualties of family breakdown creating a need for more and more therapists, counsellors and treatment agencies - whose workers, in turn, depended on the state for their livelihood.
Yeah, that's the best bit. Though "the last decade" stuff runs it pretty close- the licensing laws changed in 2005. It's like the way the Mail said devolution would undo "a thousand years if history", when the union wasn't even 300 years old. Unless they know something about Ethelred The Unready the rest of us don't.
Yeah, which is presumably why she fails to compare the time before and after they changed.
The only 24 hour licence I know is Fabric. The possibility of beer monsters turning up there and paying £15 entry for the privilege (not to mention about £5 a bottle) is rather remote.
Comment