WASHINGTON POST |
At the beginning of his presidency,
Three years later, we are back to smoke and mirrors. This time it's the Buffett Rule, which would impose a minimum 30 percent effective tax rate on millionaires. Here is how Obama introduced it last September
"
Let's do the math. The
The Buffett Rule is a farce. And yet Obama repeated the ridiculous claim again. "It will help us close our deficit." Does he really think we're that stupid?
The Buffett Rule is a substitute for tax reform, an evasion of tax reform. In three years, Obama hasn't touched tax reform, and has no intention to. The Buffett Rule is nothing but a form of redistributionism that has little to do with debt reduction.
As such, it's clever. It deftly channels the sentiment underlying
Clever politics, but it's worse than useless. It's counterproductive. The reason Buffett and
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. 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?
Copyright: | (c) 2012 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved. |
Source: | Proquest LLC |
Wordcount: | 459 |
Economix: Income of Rulers vs. the Ruled
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