President Barack Obama kicked off his re-election campaign in earnest this week with a stirring message of hope and unity for the American people: Eat the rich!
According to media reports, "fairness" will be one of the central messages of the entire Obama campaign. So fittingly, the Senate will pretend to vote on the Paying a Fair Share Act -- or the "Buffett rule" -- later this week. Sure, the United States may own $15 trillion of debt and a stagnant, underemployed economy, but nothing says leadership like coordinating your populist message with a sham congressional vote to propel fundraising in Florida.
"Fairness," an elusive idea normally exploited by spoiled children, is now the foundation of the Democratic Party's economy policy. If implemented, anyone earning $1 million a year or more would be required to pay at least 30 percent of his income in taxes. That would help reduce the deficit by raising $31 billion over 11 years, according to congressional tax analysts -- 2.8 billion a year, or less than a day's worth of new debt incurred by Washington.
That's nothing to sneeze at, says Jason Furman, a key member of the Obama economic team. "We think $47 billion is actually a meaningful amount of money for us and most Americans," he explained, overestimating the Buffett rule. And it is. It is meaningful enough to be the centerpiece of the Obama campaign, though, not meaningful enough to cut from a budget and save taxpayers the burden of paying it back.
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The millionaires and billionaires will never pay more than the average person as long as there is charitable foundations to run their money through.
ReplyDeleteooops, meant this to go here:
ReplyDeleteobama supporter here for many reasons. With that said, this buffet rule is NOT one of those reasons. Dumb idea as highlighted in this post. Stop reaching for low hanging fruit and really go after fixing the tax code. Raise the top two rates back to the clinton era. Broaden the 15% bracket to include more of the middle class that are now in the 25% bracket. And cut capital gains. That provides more spending power to the consumer and more insentive to investment.