Dear Rand:
I hope it is okay if I call you Rand, instead of "Senator-elect Paul." I promise I'll call you Senator Paul when you are sworn in. But for now it seems so much more personal if I can just call you Rand, and this letter has a lot of personal stuff in it.
Do you remember how you said the other night that, "In America, there are no rich people, there are no middle class, there are no poor people"? Well, I'm just going to say it straight out. You are wrong.
How do I know you are wrong? Well, because I know I am rich, and I also know that my brother is poor. I actually can see the difference pretty easily, so let me explain.
I am pretty young (almost 32), am married, and have two toddlers (twins, atually). We live in a pretty expensive subsurb outside one the country's major metropolitan areas. We are saving up to buy a house, and we put away money for our retirement and our kids' college educations (though I'm pretty convinced they will get some sort of athletic scholarships). We do pretty well at this. My wife stays at home with our kids right now, but our gross income was still almost $300,000 last year, and it will probably be right around $300,000 this year as well. Even paying $2,800 in rent, I still max out my 401(k), and my wife did the same when she was working. We also still manage to put about $8,000 a month in our savings account too, and so we already have a pretty big war chest saved up. I bet if we moved to Kentucky, we could buy a pretty nice house just with cash!
You might wonder how on earth we can put away so much money. After all, I think I remember John McCain saying that someone who makes around $300,000 a year isn't really rich. Well, aside from the house we rent (which really is very nice), we don't live lavishly. But we don't live like paupers either. We buy organic food, go out to dinner at local neighborhood places, take a decent vacation or two each year (travelling with twins and all, they don't end up feeling much like vacations!), have good life insurance, health insurance, was able to pay off all my large law school loans already. Heck, we bought a $45,000 hybrid SUV two years ago with cash! It feels like we're doing pretty well. And yet I still have hundreds of thousands of dollars just sitting in my bank account, doing nothing and earning close to nothing (a little bit of that was inherited, but only a very small fraction).
My brother, on the other hand, is single and works as a restaurant manager. He's doing okay these days, probably making $60,000 or so. But he still struggles a bit to make ends meet (that's why I pay for his plane tickets when he wants to visit our family). He got into debt about five years ago, and he's still digging out of that hole. His medical insurance isn't the best, and so he had to pay a couple thousand dollars out of pocket for his recent knee surgery. He should live more frugally, but he's just doing what George W. Bush told him to do after 9/11 -- he shops! Even if he just stopped shopping though, it's not like he'd be putting that much away for his retirement.
Anyways, back to me. See, it might be hard to believe, but I don't love having all that money socked away in my savings account. If I could, I'd love to invest it in some start up company that is trying to develop clean energy, or maybe in a company that retrofits buildings with solar panels. I'm just thinking out loud here. The problem is that my big stash of money is still a drop in the bucket compared with what the type of venture capital that a company like that needs. So I'm really stuck. I don't really want to put it in the stock market, because we know that game is rigged, right (and I already have all of my 401(k) in the stock market anyways)? And, anyways, I'm not sure engaging in trades on the secondary market really helps the economy all that much (though it obviously would pad the pockets of Goldman Sachs guys!).
That's why I'm asking you to raise my taxes. It's not going to hurt me one bit. I'm not going to really notice that little bit of extra money coming out my paycheck. That money would be going straight into my savings account anyways, and what am I doing with that money? NOTHING! Look, I think savings is a great thing. But I'm just saving too much. I think that it would do our country some good if the government just taxed me (and all the other rich people like me) some more and used that money to make our country better somehow.
Maybe I'm just stupid. But I don't see how it helps our country right for me to keep putting $8,000 a month in my savings account. Wouldn't $7,000 be enough? I could probably even make do with $6,000.
Whatever you decide to do, I hope that you consider my situation here. I'm really begging you to increase my taxes, because I trust that you and all those other people in Congress with you can use it wisely if you try.
Your friend,
Aaron Michael