Yes and no. Remember that SS is regressive, while Medicare is flat. The low to middle brackets, 15 and 28, get it in the neck. Even if they have a house, it's possible that the combined mortgage & property taxes will either be equal to or only a little higher than the standard deduction. Combine this with their SS & Medicare tax burden and they get hit hard. Someone like myself, who is well over the SS tax limit, has a mortgaged house, and can afford to pay quite a bit into my pension, partially (this is the kicker) as a result of the amount I can take off due to mortgage interest and property tax, is probably, when you boil it down, paying less as a proportion of my income than this person. I know I'm mooching to some extent, because at one time I was on the other side of that tax line, and it was hard, much harder than it is now, to do something like fund my pension. But once I had the housing deductions, that became much easier, so that my final tax bill fell by far more than I had thought it would before I bought the house. It was only then that I truly appreciated just how much renters and, even, low to moderate income homeowners who aren't on the long form, are taken advantage of. So I know there are people, working people, who are funding the lifestyles of folks like me - and Santelli. I'm quite sure Santelli is taking the full panoply of housing deductions, and is easily able to fully fund his pension, which lowers his tax bill even more. AND he's well over the SS limit, no doubt. All of which makes his rant disingenuous, at minimum, ignorant likely, and hypocritical at worst. For certain it's demagoguery. You just have to look at 90% of the posts on the threads related to his rant to see that.
Geez, speaking of ignorant. Your post makes about as much sense as a banker saying depositors are "living" off of banks because the banks have to pay interest for using the depositors money. And, following your logic, should the banks make bad loans with the depositors' money, the depositors should not be heard to complain if told to give some of that interest back to the banks to bail them out.
Sir how do you see it as mooching - have you not worked your butt off to get where you are - why feel sorry or guilty And this is what makes me so mad - A lot of folks feel they are due something just because someone else has it Get out and work for it - don't ask me / or others - to give up what I / we've worked hard to get Redneck
Where do you get that from? All it is is a recognition that the folks lower down are getting stepped on, a recognition I came to from personal experience. I don't feel guilty; I think it's wrong. For your information, that mortgage interest deduction actively discourages people from being debt free, and shares a large part of the blame for where we are now. Now if Santelli ranted on that, we might get somewhere.
Then my apologies Sir My house is paid for so I am not aware of the current mortgage stipulations / liabilities My iggnorance Redneck
Walter4 is correct. Santelli is not just a clown, he's a hypocritical clown of the first order. The man worked in the derivatives industry, the same damn industry that got us into this mess. It was Santelli's colleagues that encouraged a lot of this bad mortgage debt by exploiting the Bush administration's lack of oversight in banking and securities to overleverage bad mortgage paper in CDO's, SIV's, etc. Santelli's got a lot of nerve to stand there on the trading floor and moan about Obama's plan when it was the financial industry that screwed up in the first place. With regards to Obama's mortgage aid plan, people need to shut up and quit being so selfish. All you hear is "me, me, me." Waaah, he got help and I didn't. If my neighbor gets help under the Obama plan and I don't, do I whine? No. The mortgage assistance keeps my neighbor from defaulting, which helps keep up property values. He wins, I win. Instead of asking, "what's in it for me" how about "what can I do to help the country?"