Holy crap. Get a load of this video where Tigerhawk rants for 10 minutes about how terribly unfair it is that Pres. Obama is asking people who make more than $250,000 to pay more taxes, because rich people work harder and longer and are more productive than anyone else, that’s why they’re rich, and they should not be punished for not being lazy no-good bums like Americans who don’t make anywhere near $250,000.
Lisa Schiffren, very earnest:
My friend Tigerhawk, looking wiped from long days at his highly skilled day job, answers these and other questions on the charmingly unslick, intellectually forceful “Tigerhawk TV” episode here. He calls it as he sees it, with intelligence, intensity, and insight into the unrelentingly hard-working lives of the most productive people in America.
Corner readers, you know he’s right. The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians).
That must mean that stay-at-home mothers don’t work hard at all, since they don’t get paid a penny. I’m sure it would also come as a surprise to millions of Americans who work two or three or even four low-paid jobs to hear they are not hard-working. Hopefully, Lisa, neither you nor anyone you care about will ever need emergency medical services, since nurses and EMTs are so much less productive than accountants or entrepreneurs. Even the most exclusive private school won’t give your children a first-class education, because teachers are unproductive and don’t work as hard as business owners.
Schiffren continues:
They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and, as Tigerhawk points out, in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife’s former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.
Oh yes, yes, yes, absolutely, Lisa, you clever person, you! Obviously, your friend Tigerhawk and his wealthy buddies are going to go right ahead and drop their incomes by ten or twenty or fifty thousand dollars, or more — whatever it takes to get their earnings down to below $250,000 so they don’t have to see a 3% increase on their marginal tax rate.
The little people are not amused:
I am not rich and my opinion is therefore valueless, but I have worked in public relations, and if this campaign is meant to win the approval of non-rich Americans I’d say it was ill-conceived. People liked the rich better when they were in screwball comedies. I would suggest the next time Tigerhawk speaks to the little people, he should try acting like Dudley Moore in Arthur. If he finds the drunkenness difficult to convey, he can just hold a big martini glass, sprinkle his tongue with cocaine, and, to achieve the necessary impression of unsteadiness, shoot the thing on his yacht during a storm.
The only good thing about the video is the 107 comments on it, which all, with only one exception, blast Tigerhawk to kingdom come.
http://libertystreet.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-filthy-whiny-rich/
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