I happened upon an article today about a Law Professor named Todd Henderson. Todd discusses how unfair the expiring tax cuts are to his family. I’m not going to try to summarize it too much. Go read it HERE. Seriously, go read it. It’s interesting but what is FAR more interesting is the comments.
There is a second article related to this HERE. This was written by Brad Delong, who is an Economics professor at UC Berkley. Mr. Delong basically tries to break down what Mr. Henderson claims to get a more detailed estimate of Mr. Henderson’s finances.
If you have been reading personal finance blogs for long, you’ll undoubtedly come away with at least one conclusion that I did. Mr. Henderson doesn’t have an income problem, rather, he really has an expense problem. While they have a very large income, they also have absurd expenses.
What I found absolutely fascinating about these posts were the comments. Whether you agree that the coming tax increase on the wealthy is a good idea, or you think it’s a bad one, there is no question that there is a lot of strong emotions at a “class†level. There are clearly many people in our society today that feel as if things are slanted way too far to the top 5%. I think you’ll find that the first article’s comments have a fair amount of support for Mr. Henderson and there are many more in defense of him and the idea that people should be free to earn and accumulate as much money as they are capable of without the fear of losing it to taxes. The second article’s comments don’t trend that way at all (in fact I’m not sure if there was even one comment in support of Mr. Henderson.) My guess is the first is a more conservative blog, while the second is a more liberal blog.
UPDATE: It looks like Mr. Henderson couldn’t take the heat that his post generated and he has removed it. I’d recommend checking out the second link. Also, Mr. Henderson put up a second post explaining why he took down the original. Unfortunately there are people out there that made him feel unsafe, which I think is terrible.
Thanks for mentioning this. I am fascinated by this sort of thing. And oh yeah — yanked posts mean nothing. Google cache is your friend.
The comments are definitely more interesting than the original post. Like you did, I also wrote a post on this topic. As Michael says, the original post can also be found in various web caches.
I think one of the reasons why Todd Henderson feels that he’s been attacked is that a law professor is more of a public figure than the typical finance blogger is. Therefore, he’s a bigger target.
On another topic, did you change the layout of your blog?