How far should tax cuts really go?

Tea partyers should be more careful about calling Obama a socialist. The big class issue today is whether to extend the Bush tax cuts. This is the way the Obama administration frames the debate: Republicans wish to include the rich while Democrats don't.

Now terms like “rich and “middle class are notoriously slippery and flexible, but the Obama plan is specific: It is designed to exclude families whose annual incomes exceed $250,000. These families comprise only 1.5 percent of families in the United States. Yet families making $100,000 or above comprise the bulk of the richest quintile of American families, and Obama wishes to include all but a tiny fraction of them.

Maybe I'm myopic, but intuitively I classify any family making $100,000 or more as rich. I know. Ends are hard to meet and Mom has to work. Sure, the rich have bills to pay and have trouble affording custodial care for Grandma while shopping at Whole Foods and sending the kids to four-year colleges that the rest of us can no longer afford.

But, c'mon: Any minority single female raising a family, or any of the army of the unemployed, would feel uberwealthy making $100,000 a year, and so would I. So I say $100,000 is as good a cutoff as any between rich families and the rest of us.

Let's look at the Bush tax cuts in the light of these distinctions: Republicans want to include the super rich. Obama is such a populist he only wants to include the rich. So you have one party supporting a tiny number of super rich while the other supports the far more numerous but still small number of rich families.

Try to keep that in mind when you're trying to decide which party, if either, deserves your vote in November. I've decided to vote with my feet.

Roger Fraser

Rolling Meadows