Ooooh that would be a nice christmas bonus for us true believers that bought apple stock in 2000 & 2001

When Obama took office with the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, our federal debt, built up over 230 years, was $10 trillion. In just four years, it has grown 60 per cent to $16 trillion. In the next four years it is predicted to double to $20 trillion dollars. And that's coming at the very time when we need to be coming up with a way to cope with the baby boom retirement as Social Security income slips into the red for the first time in its roughly eighty years existence.

So what are these Blue State Liberals at major west coast corporations doing? They're scrambling to issue early dividends so they and their kind won't get stuck with the higher taxes, taxes that won't even begin to cover our trillion dollar deficits. And whether they issue their dividends early or not, Apple is probably the worst of the lot, keeping tens of billions of dollars offshore, so they don't pay our corporate taxes. Hey, if more taxes are good, pay them. Don't just demand that someone else pay them.

And, if these coastal liberals managed to avoid those taxes, who will get stuck with those higher taxes that the Democrats want to dump on us? It'll be small, single proprietor businesses who run all their expenses through their own income. Faced with losing money, they'll have to lay off workers in our dreadful economy. Those hard-working people, who lack the ability the rich with investments have to hide their money from taxes, are the real people who'll be screwed by these $250,000/year means you're rich tax increase.

And get ready for a very long and deep recession. Those small businesses are what grows our economy. Stomp on them, as Obama and the Democrats want to do with both taxes and the costs of mandates health insurance, and we'll be hurting for a long time.

That has the ring of truthiness to it. But I think you overlook the obvious. Historical evidence. Taxes don't hurt the economy as much as is asserted. In fact, our nation's most prosperous cycles appear to coincide with higher tax rate cycles.

And the ballooning deficit is an indirect result of the the lowest income tax rates most of us have seen in our lifetimes, combined with the inability of the higher income brackets to actually create U.S. jobs in a meaningful way. Throw in a couple of wars, and you've got a balloon. Maybe you can throw in some arguably light recession rescue spending, and there you are.

The threat handily thrown about is that the job creators will flee/fail. That $250.000.00 makes you rich, is a bit of a stretch, yet few can argue that most of the population of the U.S. earns well below that amount. 250K might better be considered "you can afford to pay a little more", than "makes you rich."

Some folk don't realize that the amount they (as a 250K earner) will owe more taxes on is the money's earned "above" the first 250K.

In short, well considered, yet still inflammatory rhetoric is still not really helpful in such discussions.

My thanks to Flying Meat for saying a lot of what I was going to say.

Inkling, again I have to question your "news" sources. In particular, here are two areas where you are just flat-out wrong.

1. The debt. You claim that it has gone from $10T to $16T in four years, but according to PolitiFact you are incorrect: it is $11T (actually, $10.95T) as of May 2012.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/jun/01/scorecard-economy-obama/

(the deficit has actually gone DOWN in recent years, by the way)

2. As pointed out by FM, your taxes don't go up if you make $250,000 -- the rate of tax on the money you make beyond that goes up (very, very modestly I might add, still well below historical average tax rates). At the absolute worst -- and assuming Congress simply does nothing -- I think we could fairly say that the upper-middle-class and "rich" will get a light misting rather than a "soaking." Of course, nobody yet knows for sure what deal will emerge on the so-called (and blown out of proportion) "fiscal cliff" talks.

PS. Maybe you're doing very well these days, but for most regular workers and business owners, $250K in income per year cleared after the numerous small-biz deductions would indeed be considered "wealthy," or at least "financially secure." It doesn't meet my definition of "rich" but it would definitely meet my criteria for being financially well-off, particularly these days.

Again, I suggest you diversify your news sources. You appear to be getting lots of bad info from your present ones.

In particular, here are two areas where you are just flat-out wrong.
1. The debt. You claim that it has gone from $10T to $16T in four years, but according to PolitiFact you are incorrect: it is $11T (actually, $10.95T) as of May 2012.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/jun/01/scorecard-economy-obama/

It's obvious you are ignorant of the difference between the publicly held component of the debt and the total debt. Inkling is referring to the total debt, and your source is only referring to the publicly held debt. Of note, you can look at the table you cite to see that the publicly held debt has gone up under Obama by 71% (using 2009 as Obama's base year). Was that the point you were trying to make?

(the deficit has actually gone DOWN in recent years, by the way)

Again, see your own source. Look at 2008 to see what a bad deficit used to look like. That was $458 billion, and now it is $1,333 billion (That's the same as $1.33 trillion, btw)

2. As pointed out by FM, your taxes don't go up if you make $250,000 -- the rate of tax on the money you make beyond that goes up (very, very modestly I might add, still well below historical average tax rates).

You are right about marginal tax rates in that many Americans do not understand how they work. Indeed the increases don't really seem like much.

The bigger problem is that most Americans don't understand how businesses are taxed either. Many small businesses in the US report their income on personal returns (S-Corporations and LLCs) and those "personal" rates basically equal less money to reinvest in the business, including in new hires and equipment.