So, Obama has as good as pledged to veto any budget which does not raise taxes on people making over $250,000 per year. Sounds like all the more reason to not improve my situation.
I often mention that I drive a forklift for a living. Not a glamorous job, and actually much harder and more risky than most people think. (I spent ten hours each on Friday and Saturday on a center-rider, and I'm still sore.) And the fact is that my job entails much more than operating machinery. The supervisors at The Company (referenced as such to avoid any confusion about whether my employer endorses my comments -- which they don't) learned long ago that I am an intelligent and motivated worker, so they keep heaping more and more training on me. As a result, I know just about every job in the building -- and most of them require lifting and moving an average of approximately 32,000 pounds of product every night with my gloved hands. That takes a major toll on a body, especially one which has suffered as much physical punishment as mine has. It's a testament to the hardiness of my ancestors that I'm able to move at all when I come home.
In short, it's not a job which many people would prefer. It's physical, dirty, and it pays well below the $250,000 threshold set by Obama. With my intelligence and intuition, I could have been making way more than that by now. But I made the conscious decision a long time ago that I would not feed any more into the corrupt governmental system than I can possibly avoid. I live a reasonably comfortable life at my current income level, and while it would be nice to have more, it's not a necessity.
I foresee lots of people making this same decision if Obama's tax increase takes effect. Many people currently making $250,000 or more per year will find ways to reduce that, and many more will forego promotions, training and education which will push them above that threshold. Indeed, several of my coworkers have indicated to me that they forego overtime to avoid being pushed into the next higher tax bracket. This is a phenomenon known as "going John Galt," and it has been underway for a while now.
For those of you who haven't read Atlas Shrugged, John Galt was a character in that book. He was a brilliant young man with an engineering degree from a major (fictional) university. He got a job at a manufacturing plant, where he began work on a revolutionary new type of motor which would draw electricity from the very air. But he abandoned the work after witnessing the devolution of society -- to an approximation of what we have today -- quit his job, and got a new job working as an unskilled laborer for a railroad. Does this sound familiar?
The "John Galt Effect" has been accelerating since 2007, and will continue to do so. As of February, Atlas Shrugged has sold 1.5 million copies since Obama was elected.
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