Their mortgage costs may seem excessive, but you don't easily make six figures in low-housing cost cities like Des Moines, and living in outer suburbs is very difficult when you work 12 hour days.

If a hypothetical couple's initial income is a total of $300K, and they work an average of 70 hours each, and assuming two weeks vacation, they are in effect getting a grand total of $28.57 an hour for their labors, and a fair percent of that is going to pay interest on the mortgage. I'm sure they are glad to know that they are rich enough to be taxed at over 50% of their marginal dollar.

UPDATE: Of course, the situation described above only applies to some fraction of the relevant taxpayers, but...

Their mortgage costs may seem excessive, but you don't easily make six figures in low-housing cost cities like Des Moines, and living in outer suburbs is very difficult when you work 12 hour days.

If a hypothetical couple's initial income is a total of $300K, and they work an average of 70 hours each, and assuming two weeks vacation, they are in effect getting a grand total of $28.57 an hour for their labors, and a fair percent of that is going to pay interest on the mortgage. I'm sure they are glad to know that they are rich enough to be taxed at over 50% of their marginal dollar.

UPDATE: Of course, the situation described above only applies to some fraction of the relevant taxpayers, but in my experience, young professional couples in large urban areas were among the most enthusiastic Obama supporters. Yet they also find themselves lumped by his administration into the category of "the rich," when, because of scenarios like the one described above, they certainly don't think of themselves as such, and indeed, in practice are not, despite their high gross income.

For that matter, my friends and acquaintances in such situations who supported Obama tend to be somewhat fiscally conservative, but voted for Obama for other reasons. In part, I think his calming rhetoric on economic policy (see video above) persuaded them that he wasn't going to govern as a "tax and spend liberal," so they could vote on, e.g., the Iraq War, abortion, et.