[MainFrame65]

"... I used to be one of those top 1% taxpayers ..."

I made it there for a year, a few years ago. My taxes for that year were more than my average earnings for the last 5 years at IBM, before I retired from there.

Now, between pension and social security, my wife and I "earn" almost 4k per month just for waking up on the first day of it.

I might do a little teaching, and I might do a little more consulting on a very short-term basis, but for the next year, after a small exemption, earning a dollar will cost me 50 cents and cost my wife 50 cents, and that dollar will be 100 percent taxable instead of 85 percent.

I'm developing an attitude....

[kittymyrib]

You would think the feds would get the idea when they see that this is exactly the rip-off-the-rich-to-buy-votes-from-the-poor strategy that has brought California to the brink of bankruptcy. But they don't. They forget that the rich can live anywhere in the world they want to live. They do not have to stay in the US and be cursed and robbed.

[Hank Rearden]

I might do a little teaching, and I might do a little more consulting on a very short-term basis, but for the next year, after a small exemption, earning a dollar will cost me 50 cents and cost my wife 50 cents, and that dollar will be 100 percent taxable instead of 85 percent.

Work for cash. Work for trade. Work for goods. Work the underground economy - it's way past time we make a serious effort to take down the government parasite system.

Screw them and their "need" to squander 2.5 Trillion every year (plus the state-level parasites, of course) - and growing ever more bloated by the day.