Andrew Sullivan links to a legal blog complaining about the financial prospects of NYC lawyers if Obama is able to enact his proposed tax changes. They write:

The effect is enormous. Betsy’s marginal tax rate goes up from an already ridiculous 42.5% to 51.4%—not including the new 6.2% marginal tax on your employer. Subject to how she structures her withholding, Betsy’s take home pay drops an average of $515 a paycheck—less in the early months of the year, but much more in the later months of the year. Add in the effects on her bonus, and Betsy loses nearly $20,000/year in take-home pay.

Yes, poor Betsy, whose pre-tax salary is $280,000/yr, would see her monthly take-home pay go from $11,600 to a mere $10,600. This is after she's already maxed-out her 401K ($15.5K/yr) and given $10K/yr to charity.

Sullivan feels Betsy's pain:

Obama's appeal to the upper middle classes is powerful. But it remains a fact that the impact of an Obama presidency would be very tough for anyone earning over $160,000 a year. Removing the cap on the payroll tax, in particular, will clobber the successful

Yes, yes. Such a loss would be very tough. Clobbered, indeed. Poor girl.

In completely unrelated news, in addition to the $300,000,000,000 the US government spends annually on the military, it's also spending somewhere close to five billion dollars each week in Iraq - five years into this stupid war. But that's magic money, which is plucked directly from the sky by an army of enslaved elves, mounted on silver unicorns. Lucky we don't have to use tax money to pay for that! Likewise for things like the $400,000,000,000 per year, the government pays on the interest of the money it owes - it's just magic money. It's so magical we barely know how much we've spent!

Of course if we'd just stop paying for silly handouts like Social Security (but don't stop collecting the tax that pays for it!), we'd have the budget under control in no time, and we could let the elves and unicorns run free again.