I’m pretty bad at math. I never took anything higher than a 500-level math course, and that was in math education. So, I would urge anybody out there who understands the error of my thinking to please, rather than yelling at me for being so stupid, simply explain the basic arithmetic I am missing.
The Smoky Mountain News tells us:
The plan to convert the old hospital in Haywood County into low-income apartments isn’t a done deal. It’s contingent on both historic preservation and low-income housing tax credits to make it financially viable.
“Low-income” is not defined in the article, but it is not unusual to describe the low-income as those who are eligible for affordable or workforce housing, and workforce housing accommodates persons earning up to 120% of AMI. We are also told if we were to tax every penny from the top 1 percent of incomes in the country, it would amount to a drop in the bucket. Then again, about 50 percent of the population contributes about 3 percent to income tax collections. The end result is that the middle class people without lawyers and accountants are going to get soaked to subsidize the poor people who can afford neither taxes nor housing. This surely should erode away the middle classes on the margin who would then be taxed beyond their means, and so they would become takers instead of makers. To provide for their housing, taxes should go up on the remaining taxpayers, which too will have a marginalized subset, and so on, and so on.
The educated among us, that is, those paying student loans for life, are saying, “And then a miracle happened. This is exciting!” I probably should have taken a few more feminist history classes.
