I pay a lower tax rate on much of my income than my cleaning lady does.What does that word "most" really mean? Is he really calling for closing the tax loopholes, or is he just asking for higher rates on the uber-wealthy? And just who would those people be? Could Buffet's reduced tax rate be due to his very high charitable contributions to a foundation that invests in things that he wants to invest in - rather than what the government wants to spend it on? It certainly would be nice to see his 1040...
At the same time, I can't help but thinking this really stinks. Who, after all made a killing on Goldman Sachs last year? Who just made a fortune on buying preferred class Bank of American stock? Neither of these profits would be touched by the current tax changes proposed by Buffet. What is that all about? Smoke and mirrors...
I wonder if his calls to tax the rich aren't a direct attack on those members of the billionaire club who chose not to join the Buffet/Gates foundation. Oh yes, remember a couple of years ago, much was made about a series of luncheons in NYC? Whatever happened to that? It seems that Paul Alen was more interested in getting free money for the Seattle Seahawks (better to spend his money on his yacht), and, well, we won't talk about Larry Ellison of Oracle fame...
OK, well, maybe that last part might make some sense. Bring those guys down to the level of everyone else. And then they can join all the other billionaires, like IKEA owner in Luxembourg, or in the Seychelles, or in some other tax have.
But for the rest of us, Richard Epstein, of the Hoover Institute has a much better idea. Make government more efficient with the money that it raises, rather than just raising more. Blogging at Defining Ideas, he points out that
The difficulty with the entire idea of "stimulus" can be explained by looking at the relationship between public and private expenditures. Ideally, a sound social program is one that tries to insure that the last dollar of revenue spent in the public sector has the same value as the last dollar spent in the private sector.
The only difference between the two scenarios is that the state must now raise either through taxation of borrowing the same $100,000. Those steps would add an extra layer of administrative cost and confusion. I know of no magic alchemy that converts admittedly wasteful private expenditures into smart public ones.
The whole article is worth the read. Much more so than jealousy-permeated op-eds penned under the guise of phony altruism.
