Rich?

More like soaked.

If you are in the top 5% of tax payers, you can’t afford to be running off to Nice for the season. This gentleman writes about his finances,

I suppose my wife and I do what we do because we like to. We must, because if you divide our $43,000 of spendable income last year by the 6,000 hours of labor, much of it manual, that the two of us put into our business (we kept track), our time works out to be compensated at around $7.50 an hour. Just the same, incentives do matter. And it is a concrete fact that cash alone fuels our growth. With more cash, our business will grow faster; we’re a small player in a big industry, and the market is there for additional growth. We’re constrained only by the availability of investment capital, and that has to be generated by our business.

This is the kind of people Hillary is “going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good”.

Hillary assumes people find this agreeable. Paul Mulshine points out how McGreevey has taken the state for a spin, and how “the rich” aren’t taking it sitting down,

But that’s spin. You can hardly blame McGreevey for outsmarting the opposition. You can blame him, however, when the spin becomes an outright lie. And that is the case with the governor’s contention on his Web site that “The millionaires can still deduct every penny of this from their federal taxes.”

They can’t, thanks to the alternative minimum tax. State and local taxes are not deductible against federal taxes for taxpayers hit with the AMT.

Thousands of New Jersey millionaires will fall into that category. Many will be paying the 9 percent state tax on top of the top federal rate of 35 percent.

That’s not the spin. That’s the fact. And the fact is, rich people are not stupid. Many of the people who are going to be hit with the McGreevey tax are people who work in the financial industry. I got a call from such a man yesterday. He pointed out to me that the area around Princeton has become one of the great financial centers of the nation. He also pointed out that Princeton is a very short drive from a very pleasant area, Bucks County, Pa. That’s where he’ll be living next year, this guy said. He can buy a house there just with the tax savings from the move.

He quoted me the numbers. Unlike the governor’s, they added up just fine.

Paul proposes the one tax I’d favor,

What we really need is a spin tax. If the Democrats in Trenton would just throw a few bucks into the state treasury for every outrageous bit of spin that leaves their mouths, we could balance the budget in a week.

Then we’d really be doing something for the common good.