When I was at I&M, one of the things I did as head of the Associates Committee was generate spreadsheets to help associates predict tax liability and avoid tax penalties from what was then an arcane and convoluted profit-sharing salary structure where about half our compensation was dumped into our laps at the end of the fourth quarter without good knowledge of how much it was going to be.
This came in handy as I tested, out of curiosity, a spreadsheet on the tax consequences of the Obama tax plan on Slim's wages. And once I had solved that problem (answer: huge), how could I resist sharing it with the latest heir to the old Greedy Associates boards,
Above the Law? The difference is, of course, that David Lat's blog gets a lot more traffic than GA boards ever did, so it not only generated a firestorm there, but got picked up by
Instapundit,
The Weekly Standard,
National Review,
Say Anything,
Modulator, and
and many others, including, of course, the previous heir to GA,
XOXOHTH.
I expected negative reaction (lawyers are overwhelmingly liberal, and overwhelmingly Obama supporters), so I made clear that this was just one dimension of a larger electoral question. And I expected people to argue that it was worth tens of thousands of dollars a year to have Obama as president. What I didn't expect were so many people claiming that Obama wasn't actually going to raise taxes, when
he plainly said he would. While Obama
has since muddied the water as to specifics (sometimes saying he would "consider" a doughnut-hole), he has refused to rule out the drastic plan he originally suggested. It would be really easy for Obama to promise to include a "doughnut hole" or to not eliminate the SS-tax cap. He certainly hasn't been afraid to promise drastically expensive programs of new spending or even tax giveaways to large swaths of the population who aren't paying much tax now. But when it comes to this, he's suddenly vague. And the only reason a politician acts that way is because he supports the more drastic, politically unpopular plan but doesn't want to get tagged with it before the election, and will say after the election "I only said I would 'consider' a doughnut-hole."
