Tyson Chandler's Lucid Thoughts on Taxes

Tyson Chandler is 7 feet tall, plays basketball for a living, and never went to college. However he is a well spoken and intelligent human being. His blog is on NBA.com and had this to say about paying taxes at a rally for Barack Obama. I'm not trying to illustrate a political point, very far from that. I have tried to keep my political views out of other people's lives. I wanted to illustrate that not every guy in the NBA is a greedy jock who can't think without a line of people doing it for them.

"It's funny, because when Obama was giving his speech, he said he was gonna give a tax cut to 95 percent of the people. He says, "If you make under $250,000 a year, raise your hand." And everybody there raised their hand, except for this one small section of guys. That was our section. And everybody around us was laughing.

But you know what, it's a bigger cause. And the way I look at it is that I can afford to pay more in taxes. But my parents, my grandparents, my cousins ... with what they make, they can't afford to cut back in their household with what they're trying to survive with. I can afford to make cuts and still survive. They can't take that knock.

I think that's what's going on now and the reason why the middle class is struggling so much. The upper class, we can take that hit. Obviously, nobody wants to take it, but we still can. And we can afford to live nice lives.

I've lived in both situations. And not only that, I'm obviously the only one in my family that can say that I'm a millionaire. I've seen my entire family struggle. So, would I rather see my whole family struggle while I get a break, or have me not get a break while the rest of my family gets one? I'll take my entire family getting a break."