How much is just enough? About $10mil.

Not to take any moral high ground (not that I hate such things), but when I was growing up, I was always taught that if you could pay your bills, keep yourself entertained, keep up your savings and have a little left over at the end of the month you were doing ok. Wow. My parents were fools – evidently you aren't doing ok until your net worth reached eight figures, or just over ten million dollars.

Very interesting article in slate yesterday about Billionaires for Kerry. They looked over research done for Elite Traveler magazine, in which they polled people whose net worth was over 1 million dollars.

The results are fascinating:

The rich folk [all over 1mil] favored Bush by a 58-42 margin… But when you break out the numbers, they tell a different story. The petit bourgeoisie millionaires were passionately for Bush: Those worth between $1 million and $10 million favored Bush by a 63-37 margin. But the haute millionaires, those worth more than million, favored Kerry 59-41.

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These results may seem confusing, as Bush is in favor of lowering taxes and Kerry in favor of raising them, but they make more sense seen through this lens: "Russ Prince explained the difference by noting that…those with a net worth of merely seven figures don't feel financially secure. 'The people with less than $10 million are still very focused on their personal financial situation in the short term'."

Those whose worth is more than $10mil care less about tax policy as they are going to be insanely rich no matter what the tax rate is, and instead get more worked up on things like Drug War policy (Soros) or the environment or, you know, social issues, and that they think that the Democrats have better policy on these topics.

Can you imagine anything more offensive than someone with 8 million dollars whose only topic of interest that gets him worked up enough to vote is taxes? "Sure we are at war with terrorism, we are occupying/liberating a Middle Eastern nation, health care is out of control, environmental policy is falling apart, pro-life forces are making headways, but the only thing that really matters to me, the only way I'd really measure progress, is to see the top marginal income tax rate below 30%."

Iraq and environmental policy are just two of the things less important than capital gains tax rates

This makes me laugh even more as I was at a party on Saturday where I talked to a person I knew from college who now works for the timber industry (he knows who he is if he visits this webpage). He brought up his salary (of course he did) which was ~$50,000, and then proceeded to talk about how he was more conservative these days as he feels his taxes are too high.

Huh? What? The idea that Bush et al is looking out for this guy when they discuss tax reform is absurd. (You don't trickle-down from the middle-class.) At that salary you will be comfortable but you'll never be independently wealthy (presumably his dream) – why not give up your dreams of being uber-rich and let your venting focus on unemployment, or health care? The idea that he feels a sense of solidarity with those who have 5 million dollars in the bank is more than a little absurd.