The Buffett rule misdirection ploy

[sirs]

I recall when the left & Obama 1st started referencing the horror that Buffett was paying a lesser tax than his secretary.......consistently omitting of course that he was applying 2 different sources of income.  Unless one is handed millions, if not billions of dollars, one GENERALLY starts at a lesser income and works hard to better themselves.  That income is taxed. 

Well, as one succeeds in their personal and financial pursuits, they can then start taking some of those income dollars (AFTER ALREADY HAVING BEEN TAXED ONCE), and invest in the market or other dividend creating ventures, generating additional income from that.  That then ALSO becomes taxed, as a Capital Gains tax, so this person is now being double taxed.

Now, if someone can be as successful as a fella like Soros in generating income thru his investments, he/she can CHOOSE to no longer "work" like a secretary, and merely live on their investement earnings, which as noted above, CONTINUES TO BE TAXED.

So the notion that "the rich" aren't paying their fair share, because they pay capital gains taxes which are less then income taxes, transparently attempts to ignore the fact that in order to get to that level, they had to to have their income taxed as well...."the rich" are most often DOUBLE TAXED.  And I'd opine there are VERY FEW that simply live off their investements, as a % of the population.  Most of "the rich" that would be hit by what Obama wants to do, still generate an income, that is also being taxed at a much higher rate than their secretary

Notice how the MSM consistently ignores these facts

[Christians4LessGvt]

and then the triple tax of the money with the "death tax".
how much death tax is Buffet's estate gonna pay compared to his secretary!
who created all those jobs/incomes/taxpayers/wealth?
we met with an attorney this week about estate planning
my brother and I own the company
but if one of us dies the other may have to take out a quick loan to pay the taxes (90 days)
and it will really get bad if Obama and the Taxocrats were to get re-elected
the amount of death taxes will go up 5 times!
work your ass off for 25 years....build a company of taxpayers...create jobs....risk capital
pay taxes on your income and investments all through the years
then get in a tax bind if one of the principals dies because the gvt wants it's blood money
so it can provide healthcare to illegals, send money to our enemies and waste money
in a million other ways.....SIRS it's a freakin disgrace!

[sirs]

and then the triple tax of the money with the "death tax".
how much death tax is Buffet's estate gonna pay compared to his secretary!

Excellent point.  The left can spare us the crap about "fairness".  The tax system, as it stands currently, is so beyond unfair, as 'the rich" are progressively taxed on so many more aspects of not just living, but in dying as well

who created all those jobs/incomes/taxpayers/wealth?

Not only is there an Obama "war on women", but on ongoing "war on success".  They must be punished, so we can reward those who fail or illegally enter our country.  Up is down, right is wrong, left is right     

[sirs]

Here we go again.

At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama argued that the country’s spiraling debt was largely the result of exploding health-care costs. That was true.

He then said the cure for these exploding costs would be his health-care reform. That was not true.

It was obvious at the time that it could never be true. If government gives health insurance to 33 million uninsured, that costs. Costs a lot. There is no free lunch.

Now we know. The Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimate is that Obamacare will add $1.76 trillion in federal expenditures through 2022. And, as one of the Medicare trustees has just made clear, if you don’t double count the $575 billion set aside for the Medicare trust fund, Obamacare adds to the already crushing national debt.

Three years later, we are back to smoke and mirrors. This time it’s not health care but the Buffett Rule, which would impose a minimum 30 percent effective tax rate on millionaires. Here is how Obama introduced it last September:

“Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a [higher] tax rate than Warren Buffett. .?.?. And that basic principle of fairness, if applied to our tax code, could raise enough money” to “stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade. .?.?. This is not politics; this is math.”

Okay. Let’s do the math.

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this new tax would yield between $4 billion and $5 billion a year. If we collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years — a span longer than the life of this republic — it would not cover the Obama deficit for 2011 alone.

As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffett Rule is a farce. And yet Obama repeated the ridiculous claim again this week. “It will help us close our deficit.” Does he really think we’re that stupid?

Hence the fallback: The Buffett Rule is a first step in tax reform. On the contrary. It’s a substitute for tax reform, an evasion of tax reform. In three years, Obama hasn’t touched tax (or, for that matter, entitlement) reform, and clearly has no intention to. The Buffett Rule is nothing but a form of redistributionism that has vanishingly little to do with debt reduction and everything to do with reelection.

As such, it’s clever. It deftly channels the sentiment underlying Occupy Wall Street (original version, before its slovenly, whiny, aggressive weirdness made it politically toxic). It perfectly pits the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Indeed, it is OWS translated into legislation, something the actual occupiers never had the wit to come up with.

Clever politics, but in terms of economics, it’s worse than useless. It’s counterproductive. The reason Buffett and Mitt Romney pay roughly 15 percent in taxes is that their income is principally capital gains. The Buffett Rule is, in fact, a disguised tax hike on capital gains. But Obama prefers to present it as just an alternative minimum tax because 50 years of economic history show that raising the capital gains tax backfires: It reduces federal revenue, while lowering the tax raises revenue.

No matter. Obama had famously said in 2008 that even if that’s the case, he’d still raise the capital gains tax — for the sake of fairness.

For Obama, fairness is the supreme social value. And fairness is what he is running on — although he is not prepared to come clean on its price. Or even acknowledge that there is a price. Instead, Obama throws in a free economic lunch for all. “This is not just about fairness,” he insisted on Wednesday. “This is also about growth.”

Growth?

The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. Now, in the middle of a historically weak recovery, Obama wants to raise our capital gains tax to the fourth highest. No better way to discourage investment — and the jobs and growth that come with it. (Except, perhaps, for hyperregulation. But Obama is working on that too.)

Three years ago, Obama promised universal health care that saves money. Today, he offers a capital gains tax hike that spurs economic growth. This is free-lunch egalitarianism.

The Buffett Rule redistributes deck chairs on the Titanic, ostensibly to make more available for those in steerage. Nice idea, but the iceberg cometh. The enterprise is an exercise in misdirection — a distraction not just from Obama’s dismal record on growth and unemployment but, more important, from his dereliction of duty in failing to this day to address the utterly predictable and devastating debt crisis ahead.

Class warfare known as the Buffet Rule

[Christians4LessGvt]

[Xavier_Onassis]

Now that is infantile.

[sirs]

The Buffet Rule, indeed is

[sirs]

Buying ‘Buffett Rule' makes you a fool

In the end, free societies get the governments they deserve. So, if the American people wish to choose their chief executive on the basis of the "war on women," the Republican theocrats' confiscation of your contraceptives, or whatever other mangy and emaciated rabbit the Great Magician produces from his threadbare topper, they are free to do so, and they will live with the consequences. This week's bit of ham-handed misdirection was "the Buffett Rule," a not-so-disguised capital-gains tax hike designed to ensure that Warren Buffett pays as much tax as his secretary. If the alleged Sage of Omaha is as exercised about this as his public effusions would suggest, I'd be in favor of repealing the prohibition on Bills of Attainder, and the old boy could sleep easy at night. But instead every other American "millionaire" will be subject to the new rule – because, as President Obama said this week, it "will help us close our deficit."

Wow! Who knew it was that easy?

A-hem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (the same nonpartisan bean counters who project that on Obama's current spending proposals the entire U.S. economy will cease to exist in 2027) Obama's Buffett Rule will raise – stand well back – $3.2 billion per year. Or what the United States government currently borrows every 17 hours.

So in 514 years it will have raised enough additional revenue to pay off the 2011 federal budget deficit. If you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years is the year 2526. There's a sporting chance Joe Biden will have retired from public life by then, but other than that I'm not making any bets.

Let's go back to that presidential sound bite: "It will help us close our deficit."

I'm beginning to suspect that the Oval Office teleprompter may be malfunctioning, or that perhaps that NBC News producer who "accidentally" edited George Zimmerman into sounding like a racist has now edited the smartest president of all time into sounding like an idiot. Either way, it appears the last seven words fell off the end of the sentence. What the president meant to say was:

"It will help us close our deficit ... for 2011 ... within a mere half-millennium!" [Pause for deafening cheers and standing ovation.]

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path. The current federal debt burden works out at about $140,000 per federal taxpayer, and President Obama is proposing to increase both debt and taxes. Are you one of those taxpayers? How much more do you want added to your $140,000 debt burden? As the Great Magician would say, pick a number, any number. Sorry, you're wrong. Whatever you're willing to bear, he's got more lined up for you.

Even if you're absolved from federal income tax, you, too, require enough people willing to keep the racket going, and America is already pushing forward into territory the rest of the developed world is steering well clear of. On April Fools' Day, Japan and the United Kingdom both cut their corporate tax rates, leaving the United States even more of an outlier, with the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world: The top rate of federal corporate tax in the US is 35 percent. It's 15 percent in Canada. Which is next door.

Well, who cares about corporations? Only out-of-touch dilettante playboys like Mitt Romney who – hmm, let's see what I can produce from the bottom of the top hat – put his dog on the roof of his car as recently as 1984! That's where your gran'ma will be under the Republicans' plan, while your contraceptiveless teenage daughter is giving birth on the hood. "Corporations are people, my friend," said Mitt, in what's generally regarded as a damaging sound bite by all the smart people who think Obama's plan to use the Buffett Rule to "close the deficit" this side of the fourth millennium is a stroke of genius.

But Mitt's not wrong. In the end, a corporation doesn't pay tax. The marble atrium of Global MegaCorp's corporate HQ is indifferent to the tax rate; the Articles of Incorporation in the bottom drawer of the chairman's desk couldn't care less. Every dollar of "corporate" tax has to be fished out the pocket of a real flesh-and-blood human being, whether shareholder, employee or customer.

And that's the problem. For what Obama's spending, there aren't enough of them, or us, or "the rich" – and there never will be. There is only one Warren Buffett. He is the third-wealthiest person on the planet. The first is a Mexican, and beyond the reach of the U.S. Treasury. Mr. Buffett is worth $44 billion. If he donated the entire lot to the Government of the United States, they would blow through it within four-and-a-half days. OK, so who's the fourth-richest guy? He's French. And the fifth guy's a Spaniard. No. 6 six is Larry Ellison. He's American, but that loser is only worth $36 billion. So he and Buffett between them could keep the United States Government going for a week. The next-richest American is Christy Walton of Wal-Mart, and she's barely a semi-Buffett. So her $25 billion will see you through a couple of days of the second week. There aren't a lot of other semi-Buffetts, but, if you scrounge around, you can rustle up some hemi-demi-semi-Buffetts: If you confiscate the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it comes to $1.5 trillion, which is just a little less than the Obama budget deficit for year.

But there are a lot of "millionaires," depending on how you define it. Jerry Brown, California's reborn Gov. Moonbeam, defines his "millionaire's tax" as applying to anybody who earns more than $250,000 a year. "Anybody who makes $250,000 becomes a millionaire very quickly," he explained. "You just need four years." This may be the simplest wealth creation advice since Bob Hope was asked to respond back in 1967 to reports that he was worth half-a-billion dollars. "Anyone can do it," said Hope. "All you have to do is save a million dollars a year for 500 years."

It's that easy, folks! Like President Obama says, all you have to do to pay off his 2011 deficit is save $3.2 billion a year for 500 years.

He thinks you're stupid. Warren Buffett thinks you're stupid. Maybe you are. But not everyone is. And America's foreign debtors understand that "the Buffett Rule" is just another pathetic sleight of hand en route to the collapse of the U.S. dollar, and of American society shortly thereafter.

When he's not talking up his buddy Warren, the Half-Millennium Man has been staggering around demonizing Paul Ryan's plan, which would lead, he says, to the end of the weather service, air traffic control, national parks, law enforcement, and drinkable water. Given what's at stake, you might think then that the president would have an alternative plan. But he has none, save for his proposal to pay off the 2011 federal deficit by the year 2526. The Obama No-Plan plan means the end of everything. That really ought to be the only slogan the Republicans need this fall:

What's your plan?

And all you hear are crickets chirping.

But don't worry, they're federally funded crickets, chirping at a research facility in North Carolina investigating whether there's any correlation between chirping crickets and the inability of America's political institutions to effect meaningful course correction.

Hey, relax. The Buffett Rule will pick up the tab.

[sirs]

[sirs]

Buffett Rule more about pandering than 'fairness'

The president seemingly lost a major fight Monday when the Senate shot down his "Buffett Rule" minimum tax for the wealthy, one of his signature issues and what promises to be a central plank of his reelection campaign.

Or did he lose?

For that matter, had the Buffett Rule passed, what would he have achieved?

"This legislation will do nothing with regard to job creation, with regard to gas prices, with regard to economic recovery," said Sen. John Kyl of Arizona, one of the Republicans who blocked the measure from getting the necessary 60 votes for continued debate.

To that we might add: This legislation would have done nothing about the deficit, or the debt or for that matter "fairness," because heaping added burdens on taxpayers for earning more money than others isn't fair. It punishes success, a perverse thing to do, but unfortunately something that seems ingrained in government.

President Barack Obama knew that his Buffett Rule was going nowhere. He can count votes.

The Buffett Rule wasn't about revenue, economics or fairness; it was about pandering to voters, some of whom, to their shame, seem to relish the idea of punishing people who make a lot of money.  ( certain xo-patron fits that mold nicely)  That attitude, more akin to covetousness than to a spirit of fairness, seems largely to dissipate as people make more money. Not too surprisingly, it begins to seem less "fair" to punish success after one has tasted success than when success was viewed from a distance.

Sadly, the president's pandering to the lowest of the electorate's inclinations is to be expected in the midst of his reelection campaign. Despite his promise in his first campaign to elevate political discourse, Mr. Obama has shown himself to be a willing practitioner of precisely what he promised to reform: politics as usual. If he were sincere, he clearly had other options.

If revenue was the goal, cut taxes. Tax revenue increases as people invest and spend money government otherwise would take from them.

If economic stimulus was the goal, cut taxes. More money in private hands is leveraged far more productively than turning it over to spend on unproductive government programs.

If fairness was the goal (which it never was), abolish the income tax altogether. It unfairly punishes people by discouraging them to be productive. If that's a bridge too far, despite its obvious fairness, at least the president could have worked to replace the progressive income tax with a flat tax, which is certainly fairer than punishing some taxpayers disproportionately.

Don't hold your breath however, until the GOP takes over both the WH & Senate

[sirs]

Now that the Buffett tax is dead (or is it?), what was it based on?
April 18th, 2012, 10:23 am · · posted by Mark Landsbaum

Defeat in the Senate of the class warfare bill known as the Buffett Rule, gives conservatives something to crow about, liberals something to whine about and the president something to campaign on  in his reelection campaign. The latter was probably  the intention all along.

"Here's how I'm going to redistribute your money. We call this Progressive."

But the almost religious desire to soak the rich has become pathological among Democrats and leftists. Two ballot initiatives in California would pile on, and you can bet we haven’t heard the last of Barack Obama singing the praises of disproportionately taking money from people who make more than you do.

What’s behind this, other than the obvious covetousness, greed and envy, so cleverly called “the progressive tax”?

“The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, giving Congress the ‘power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived’,” writes Burton Folsom,  Jr., at the Freeman. “It did not rule out ‘ability to pay’ as the basis for the levy. The amendment became law just as Woodrow Wilson was coming into the presidency. As a Progressive, Wilson wanted to start small, establish a precedent, and then increase rates over time. Under the new tax law, exemptions were so high that few Americans earned enough to pay any tax. Rates started at 1 percent and rose slowly to a high of 7 percent on all income over $500,000.”

This was an easy sell to voters since fewer than one American family in 100 would pay anything. But politicians could promise to use the money raised to heap benefits on those who pay little or nothing. Sound familiar?

“And who would dare to suggest that billionaire John D. Rockefeller did not have the ability to pay 7 percent of his huge income to the government?” Folsom asks rhetorically.

Of course, once the foot was in the door, there was no stopping them.

“Thus U.S. politicians had incentives to steadily increase the income tax in the 1900s,” Folsom recalls. “The top rate went from 7 to 15 percent in Wilson’s first term. World War I took it over 60, then over 70 percent. It didn’t drop below 50 percent until 1924, and was about 25 percent the rest of the decade. The rate rose to 63 percent in 1932 under Herbert Hoover and then 79 percent in 1935. The World War II years pushed it over 80 percent, and in 1945, FDR’s last year in office, the top was 94 percent on all income over $200,000. Wealthy people apparently had a very high ability to pay, and politicians had a very high desire to fight wars and win elections.”

OK, so they were deceptive. A tiny rate. Few people paying. And it turns into just the opposite.

But isn’t the cause worthwhile? Doesn’t it take a village to, uh, run a village?

What’s Folsom say?

“If wealth really needs to be redistributed, should we trust people to do it with their own money or politicians with other people’s money?”

Another rhetorical question.

“Rockefeller, for example, was the best and cheapest oil refiner in the world. His charitable giving included the Erie Street Baptist Church, a cure for meningitis, and funding for Tuskegee Institute. That was how he redistributed his own wealth. Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, built libraries, and banker Andrew Mellon built the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In the political realm, President Franklin Roosevelt supported high taxes and gave subsidies to silver miners, farmers, and the Tennessee Valley Authority to make cheap electric power,” writes Folsom.

So, what’s the difference? Again, Folsom explains:

“Charitable givers and politicians both pursue their self-interest, but the politician’s self-interest includes winning votes. That means, if possible, channeling subsidies to voting groups to win reelection at the expense of taxpayers in general. Rockefeller’s gifts to Tuskegee did not cost anyone but him any money. FDR’s subsidy to silver miners, by contrast, cost millions of taxpayers small amounts of tax revenue. It helped FDR carry several western states each time he ran for president. His redistribution efforts were essential to his being reelected.”

So, what began as supposedly an innocent infringement on those who can afford it with promises of benefits to those wanting benefits, ends up perverting charity.

Rather than people bestowing benefits on those the people decide to help, government bestows benefits on those whom politicians decide to help – and the people most helped by this process are, yeah, politicians.

Commentary

[Plane]

On the other hand.


If Obama wants to eliminate the progressiveness of taxation and lower the rate of income tax to match the rate of capitol gains taxes ....

...couldn't he mean that?

[sirs]

He could but I seriously doubt he wishes to eliminate the progressiveness of taxation