I feel like if you make $250k a year as a family you no longer qualify as middle class. Or maybe all of us are just poor?

5 million is certainly ridiculous.  Only 40,931 tax returns fall into that Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) range (that's 0.03% of all individual tax returns).  But $200k is still only 2.94% of all filers.  In fact, 80% of filers have AGIs less than $75k.  If your AGI is above $100k, there are only 16.2 million filers (11.7%) that share that burden. =)  This is all based on total returns, without regard to filing status.  

Actual taxable income is a little different.  After factoring in filing status and deductions, filers with an AGI over $100k make up 61.1% of taxable income and 73% of tax revenue.  

Interestingly, once you make over $5 million in AGI, the percentage of taxes paid as a portion of AGI drops from 24.3% to 23.1%.  And once you are at over $10 mill, it drops again to 20.1%.  This demonstrates the imbalance that the differing treatment of capital gains and investment income creates.

All that said, even 250k seems high to me.  You could lower the bar to $100k and still not affect 88% of all filers.  To make it fair though, you need adjust the capital gains tax so that people making more than $5 mill don't end up paying less as a percent of income in tax than people in lower brackets.

Okay. Let's drop back to $100k.

To his credit, Rick Warren did follow up with McCain (in this instance, anyway) and insist on an answer to the question, "Who do you consider the rich?"

Given the answer, however, I would appreciated another follow-up question, "Who do you consider the poor?"

Or better yet, "Do you ever consider the poor?"

I live in McLean.  My neighbors and my family are all what I would consider "rich."  Only the public servants in my neighborhood deserve a tax cut - people making $300k+ ABSOLUTELY DO NOT.

Senator McCain:

I DO NOT KNOW A SINGLE PERSON - IN MCLEAN, VIRGINIA WHO MAKES OVER $5 MILLION/YEAR.

DNC:

For the love of God, run this ad EVERYWHERE.

The comic strip Li'l Abner used to have a series about the fictional land of Slobbovia (similar to Borat's take-off on Khazakistan), where the barefoot peasants stood around in snow drifts to their naked knees, glorying in their misery, whiners all. Slobbovia was divided geographically and economically into Upper and Lower Slobbovia, subdivided further into Upper Upper Slobbovia (where the richer kulaks lived, of course, who had two potatoes for dinner at night) to Middle Upper, Lower Upper, Middle Middle Slobbovia, and so on down to Lower Lowest Slobbovia, where peasants probably had a stone for dinner, if they ate at all. Since McCain lives in fantasyland, I can only assume he divides the US into Upper Upper, Middle Upper, and so on, down to the Lower Lowest with a stone for dinner. And where would he draw the line for Lower Lowest, I ask, and so should the Reverend have asked. Where would you draw the line?

some of my clients have an income of $637 per month in SSI.  Yes, they also get food stamps, and Medicaid, but really, have you ever tried to live on $637 per month?  What McCain said just makes me ill.  The hard working people who live on an hourly wage and are watching the price of everything rise will instantly recognize how out of touch McCain is.  I think this $5 million comment needs to be trumpeted, along with Phil Gramm's whiner comment, in every possible place, from now to the election.  It shows, better than any policy argument, exactly who you are dealing with.

Phil Gramm needs to have a few commercials about him also.  He and his wife worked hard to deregulate Enron, they made millions, we know what happened to Enron.  Gramm then worked to modernize banking laws through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which some say helped to bring about the mortgage crisis.  Where is Gramm now? Working for a Swiss bank, UBS, which has been accused of helping rich Americans evade taxes. Call me a whinner but if these folks aren't out of touch with the average American, I don't know who is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...  

McCain said he was joking and that his innocuous comment would wind up in some hack's commercial.

"bomb bomb bomb Iran" or when his top economic advisor talked about a "mental recession" and a "nation of whiners."

((http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zovk-H5qmBE))

((youtube Zovk-H5qmBE))

John McCain and his hacks have been distorting Obamas positions in McCain ads for the past 2 months.  If this is the game to be played, which it obviously is, then let the spins begin.

It's unfortunate but true that the American people can only remember small political sound bites reported on TV between American Idol and Big Brother 17.

Then why has his party been practicing it since 1980, robbing from the poor and middle class to enrich the already wealthy?  What a liar.  And what's this crap about the government taking over the health care system...what an idiot.