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John McCain, still taking fire for saying "rich" begins at $5 million, has offered up a new definition of the term:
“I define rich in other ways besides income,” he said. “Some people are wealthy and rich in their lives and their children and their ability to educate them. Others are poor if they’re billionaires.”That's not rich. That's "happy." Or "content." In any case, McCain isn't running for chief therapist or parishioner. He's running for president. In that context, he's going to have to do things like set tax rates, and since the Internal Revenue Service isn't good at intuiting the spiritual nourishment one gets from his relationship with his children, they tend to set tax rates by examining income. That's why when Rick Warren asked the original question, he said, "Everybody keeps talking about, 'Well, we're going to tax the rich.' How do you define that?" But give McCain some credit: His tax plan does not want to tax the rich. Unlike in Obama's plan, there's not an arbitrary income inflection point at which juncture you begin paying more. Rather, under McCain's proposal, your tax burden becomes less onerous as you become richer (you all remember this graph, right?). So asking him to define where "rich" -- in the sense that you have enough money to pay a bit more back -- starts is a bit at odds with his stated views on the matter. Richness has no policy implications save that you get an even bigger tax cut, and so there's no real reason for McCain to understand the national income distribution in a manner consistent with crafting public policy around it.
