>A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.

>”We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00,” she said.

–ABC News, [Upper-Income Taxpayers Look for Ways to Sidestep Obama Tax-Hike Plan] [abc]

Now, some people, reading this, will nod sagely. “How true!” they will say. “We, the sage nodding people, must cut our incomes as well!” But the vast majority of you will blink and say “Huh?”–or some variation on “Huh?”, such as “Wha?” or “Buh?”–because you do your own taxes and you know damn well *it doesn’t work like that*. When you jump into a higher tax bracket, the higher rate applies *only to the money you earn past that point*.

Imagine, for one moment, the perfect, impregnable obliviousness necessary to make it through college, through law school, through decades in the legal profession, and not know this. This woman’s skull must have grown from some very high-grade premium lead, the kind Lex Luthor uses for the boxes he keeps his chunks of Kryptonite in. Take your new information, encode it in the tiniest sub-atomic particle you can smash a thing down to–it hasn’t a prayer of penetrating.

This is why I’m begging you, please: if you know any of these people–these big-money blockheads, the high-rolling bowling ball brains of our economy–please, *please don’t enlighten them*.

The less the Anonymous Lawyers of the world work the better off we are. These are not the people we need to have running the world. For every one of these airheads who cuts back or steps aside, someone else–someone *smarter*–is ready to take their place. The sooner they do, the sooner the rest of us can get on with rebuilding the country.

(Found via [Hullabaloo] [digby].)

[abc]: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6975547
[digby]: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/too-stupid-to-fill-my-teeth-by-digby.html