Democracy for Vancouver

(Other than the fact that we earned $12 in interest income last year.)

I just did our taxes. This is the form from our TaxCut software* which shows our income matched against the national average.

I’m not an economist, but when the median income in this country is about $48,000, the rich have to be very, very rich in order that the average interest income is $1,618.

With savings interest rates at somewhere around 4%, you’d have to have $40,000 in savings to earn $1,600 in interest. Somehow I don’t think families earning an average of $48k are able to maintain savings of 80% of their income.

As for dividends, let’s just take the S&P 500 as an example: in 2007, the average annual dividend for the S&P 500 was $1.06 per share. So, to earn dividends of $2,800, you’d have to hold an average of 2,642 shares of S&P 500 stock, at a 2007 average value of $50.67 a share.

How many people do you know who own $134,000 worth of stock?

Certainly not all of the 117 million taxpayers in the U.S., which is what the dividend figures represent: an average of all U.S. taxpayers.

But John McCain says we must make the tax cuts permanent.

We are living in the Roman Empire.

*Not recommended, but I’m too lazy to change since it imports all of our address, employer, mortgage, student loan and dependent information from prior years.