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Chicago professor: It's tough to get by on $250K!

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, Sep 24, 2010.

  1. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

  2. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    I can understand his concern over the $250K in student loans. His wife is a doctor, and she probably racked up most of that. Which is why, I think, Obama should give tax credits to doctors for student loans.

    But overall, yeah, the guy deserved to get flogged. I'm tired of hearing politicians (of one certain party) defending the rich people. I'd like to ask them why they feel that Craig Dubow deserves lower taxes after receiving a $1.5 million bonus last year on top of his multimillion-dollar compensation package for laying me and over 3,000 other people off.
     
  3. HanSenSE

    HanSenSE Well-Known Member

    And Latrell Sprewell is still trying to feed his family.
     
  4. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Hey, he's single handedly keeping journalists employed.

    Did the Trib assign their entire staff to this story?
     
  5. printdust

    printdust New Member

    Gee where to slice? Everyone has a nanny!

    Everyone has their kids in private schools!

    One of the reasons public schools don't improve is that most of the wealthy haven't got much invested in them anymore, like their own kids or grandkids.

    So they don't care.
     
  6. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    Poor form for the guy to discuss it in print, obviously, but I sort of understand his sentiment. My situation probably isn't that much different from his in a lot of ways, although I don't have a nanny and I took back the lawn from the lawn guy two years ago. I also know damn well from growing up in a lower middle-class environment that things could be a lot tighter for me and the cash flow issue is a function of your lifestyle and where you choose to live and work, too.

    Yeah, my daughter gets guitar lessons, spends too much on clothes and goes to a private school (scholarship pays for 90 percent, though), my son goes to camp in the summer, we take some nice vacations and I'm fortunate enough to be able to put the max into our 401K. Our house has some value but only because we live in Westchester. It's a three-bedroom fixer-upper with a kitchen that dates back to the '40s and windows that need to be replaced. We have a hefty mortgage payment and pay something like $15,000 a year in property taxes on top of that. My daughter is visiting colleges as we speak.

    Which is all to say, I don't feel very rich. I feel like I'm maybe on the lower end of the upper middle class, at least the way it plays out in the northern NYC burbs.

    Yet I'm going to take a relatively big hit when tax cuts for the "rich" aren't extended, too. In fact, I'll be right smack at the bottom of that income bracket. The big difference between that guy and me is that I'm OK with it. I'm perfectly willing to pay my fair share to help get our country's economy get back in shape while ensuring that genuinely poor and middle-class people are given a fighting chance.
     
  7. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Somewhere there's a kid from a poor country laughing at the audacity of Americans have trouble getting by on $30k.

    It doesn't make sense, but we'll always judge our basic standard of living relative to our immediate peers, and we'll feel cramped if we can't easily afford that.
     
  8. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    The article doesn't mention how old this guy is, but it sounds like he has young kids.

    It seems like when someone reads that a person/couple is/are making $250,000, that they've been making it for years.

    He spent time in Law School. She went to Med School. I'll bet they've just begun to make $250,000 after years of schooling, studying, and hard work.

    And they're loaded up with debts.

    People think $250,000 is a ton of money because we think about what our parents made & what they could afford.

    There's no doubt that exceptions are higher now. Two nice cars, nanny, private school, lessons. They're all expected.

    But in a high tax, high cost city like Chicago, when you're still trying to pay off debt, $250,000 isn't going to cover all of that as easily as you'd think.
     
  9. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    But, hey, let's put six reporters on this story and see if we can make this guy look like an ass.
     
  10. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    Exactly.
     
  11. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    The guy's point, lost in all the controversy, is that a bigger marginal tax bite is going to materially affect his family's spending. Ultimately, then, the question becomes who is going to do the spending -- Washington or him -- and whether one or the other might make "better" decisions.
     
  12. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Which is a fair point for him to make and a good starting point for a good substantive discussion.

    Which is why it is so disappointing that this guy with all his degrees and all his intelligence turned yellow and took down his post at the first sign of a backlash.
     
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