Poor Cindy

Now we know why John McCain believes someone is truly wealthy only after attaining an income of $5 million or more in a single year.

Poor Cindy McCain, suffering with the rest of the middle class and trying to decide which of her seven (or is it eight?) homes to bed down in on any given night, made a motley $4.2 million last year, according to the tax returns that the McCain campaign released today.

Barack Obama has said that you are “rich” if you make more than $250,000. And if you are rich, he recently told Joe, the tax-delinquent, Bush-backing, non-union plumber, you should spread your wealth around. By Obama’s standards poor Cindy has a lot more spreading to do than the Joe’s of the world.

It’s called progressive taxation. I like to call it “greed busting.”

What we have now is REgressive taxation: The more you make, proportionally the less you pay in taxes.

Here it is well to invoke one Jesus Christ, who didn’t stop with spreading it around. (Calling all Christians! Sarah, John, are you listening?) Christ said to the Cindy McCains of his time, GIVE IT ALL AWAY!

There is one small glitch in the story of the humble life of middle-class Cindy, heiress to an Arizona beer-schlepping fortune. In 2006, according to her tax returns, she was actually “rich” by John’s very own standards. The returns show that in that year, her income was “over $6 million,” according to the New York Times.

The Times didn’t report how much over. The newspaper of record may have concluded that at some point it doesn’t much matter. A million here, a million there. Any way you look at it, Republican or Democrat, you are rich.