Firestorm Erupts After Blogger Says His $400G Income Doesn't Make Him Rich

Todd Henderson, a law professor at the University of Chicago, usually kept his blog posts to matters of corporate law and the markets. But last week he made it personal.

He posted a portrait of his family finances to make his case that those who make more than $250,000 a year are struggling, like everyone else, to make ends meet -- even though people in that income bracket will see their taxes go up if President Obama succeeds in his plan to extend the Bush tax cuts only for low- and middle-income Americans.

“A quick look at our family budget, which I will gladly share with the White House, will show him that, like many Americans, we are just getting by despite seeming to be rich. We aren’t,” Henderson wrote. 

He said he and his wife, a doctor, paid $100,000 in federal and state taxes last year and $15,000 in property taxes. He wrote that they have a mortgage on a house they own a short distance from President Obama’s home, and they are paying off $250,000 in student loans. With an annual income of more than $400,000, he wrote, he and his wife are  far from super-rich.

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But others disagree -- and none more bitingly than Prof. Bradford DeLong of the University of California at Berkeley, who dismissed Henderson’s posting as whining.

"By any standard they are rich,” DeLong said. "But they don’t feel rich.” 

He said the things Henderson takes for granted — retirement savings, private schools, new cars — are out of reach for most Americans, and he dismissed his complaint as a simple “cash flow problem.”

But Michelle Newton-Francis, a sociology professor at American University, said Henderson's blog had an impact because it showed “the country is redefining what it means to be rich and powerful.”

Common sense - 99% of Americans can NOT afford retirement savings, private schools, new cars and doubtless many of the things that Henderson assumes is his right!  $400,000 IS a lot of money.  It would buy the average house in suburban Boston for cash with money left over!  Henderson understandably doesn't want to pay more taxes.  No one does.  But if he's just getting by, he needs to look at how he's spending his money as he is by the standard of all but a fraction of 1% of Americans, rich.

As to Newton-Francis, it is NOT the country that is redefining what it means to be rich and powerful, it is the rich and powerful that want the other 99%+ of Americans to buy into the idea that they are not rich and powerful.  

Common sense suggests that it is long past time for Congress to begin acting on behalf of the average American not the rich and powerful who view themselves as entitled or big business that thinks shipping jobs overseas is OK.