Pushing Lifestyle Through Taxes

I have been watching this election season avidly, scrutinizing the candidates' plans, and discovered in dismay that one has managed to dupe us with promises of more and more money... unless you make over $250K/year. Or maybe it's $200K/year. It might be $150K/year. As of yesterday, it was $120K/year, which puts the "rich folk" label on a dual wage-earner household in which both members have middle-class jobs. But that's besides the point. The Democrats have been inciting class hatred for decades now.

What struck me about this new plan is the part that almost nobody is talking about. Obama's plan is touted as a tax cut, but it actually is not a tax cut at all. His plan involves tons of new tax credits. There are two important differences between the two. The first is that a tax cut reduces the amount of money that government takes from you, while a tax credit increases the amount that the government gives back. The second, and the focus of my post today, is that tax cuts apply according to income regardless of lifestyle, while you must qualify for a tax credit by meeting a special set of circumstances.

A lot of people have been offering me a website that supposedly asks you a few questions and calculates how much more money Obama plans to give you. I checked the site myself and found that my number is very, very low. So low, in fact, that the Bush tax cuts "for the rich" gave me more money than Obama is promising me, even as he desires to roll back those cuts. Basically, I will come out on the bad side if he is elected. Am I rich?

Obama's Families In Trouble on his half-hour infomercial made me laugh. One woman worries that she won't be able to stock as much snack food in her fridge. Another woman, sporting a $40/month acrylic nail job, mourns about the difficulty she has buying milk. Look, hon, I do nothing with my nails so I can afford milk.

My husband makes a decent wage, and I am a homemaker and homeschooling mother. That combination puts us in the same income level as "Working Class", and the only thing that would technically push us into "Lower Middle Class" is my husband's job type. We have a fixed-rate mortgage that we staunchly refused to convert to variable-rate when the interest levels for variable bounced to 1%, mostly because we already knew that they would rise above 10% at some point in the next thirty years. People don't seem to know how to plan further than the next five years anymore.

Our tax burden, federal, state, Social Security, and Medicaid all comes up to about 20% of our income. Our mortgage payment is over half of our net income. We pay next for electricity, auto insurance, and phone service (including internet). We own both our cars outright. We do not own a cell phone, not even an emergency plan. With all of that, the rest of our income is spent on food and gas, plus any emergencies, mostly auto repair, that demand a response. We have no entertainment budget.

Our food budget is 2/3rds of what a family our size would get on welfare, and it will be a little over half that when the baby is born. We actually took the unusual step of applying for energy assistance this year, and found that we were only $500/year over the mark. That puts us, by the way, just above 150% of the state poverty level. You would think Obama would be falling all over himself to help us, right? Why will his new plan benefit us almost nothing? Simple: we do not fit into his 'poor person lifestyle'. In plainer talk, we don't qualify for his tax credits, which include:

* Doubling the earned income tax credit if you pay child support
* $4K tax credit if you paid college tuition
* $7K tax credit if you bought a "clean car"
* $6K tax credit if you pay for daycare

So basically, since my husband has not abandoned his family, neither of us are in college, we can't afford to buy a car, and I choose to raise our children myself, we don't qualify for any of those Obama Tax Credits. There are more, of course, and we don't qualify for them either. Education tax credits do not apply to homeschoolers, etc.

So it doesn't matter to Obama that next spring we will have a food budget nearly half of that from a family on welfare, or that we are likely to put our winter oil tank fill on the credit card because we simply do not have it in the bank, even though we do not make any of the poor choices that land many other families in poverty. This is not class warfare anymore. We are "rich", not because we make a lot of money, but because we don't live the way he expects us to. Perhaps, and this is admittedly a conjecture, we do not live the way that contributes to the socialist society the Democrats wish to impose. And so we must be punished until we fall into line.

Already my husband knows of coworkers, even in his white-collar workplace, who choose not to marry their girlfriends for the simple reason that the state will provide for them better then their men can. One in particular, with full intention to be a good father to his girlfriend's baby, nevertheless waited until the child was born before marriage so that the state would provide her with the prenatal care she needed, the care that he could not provide himself, even as he was taxed at or near the same 20%-when-counting-federal/state/SS/etc. rate that my husband and I suffer under.

I say 'suffer', but we're holding our own. Even on such a small food budget, I still provide good meals for my family by resorting to beans, rice, potatoes, and other simple and unpackaged foods. The woman in Obama's infomercial with snacks in her refrigerator made me simply shake my head, because we simply cannot afford any snack foods in our budget. According to Obama, she needs more help than we do.

This is no longer just about Democratic class warfare. This is about the government rewarding some lifestyles over others. If you try to work hard, live frugally, and trouble no man, raising your children within the framework of a traditional family, the Democrats do not care about you.