From The Foundry blog:
President Obama traveled to Florida yesterday to distract the nation from its real problems by laying out his case for the Buffett Rule, a plan to drastically raise taxes on successful Americans and small businesses. The core of his argument is that the rich aren’t paying their fair share. It makes for great populist rhetoric, especially when families are hurting and angry under today’s high unemployment, but the result is terrible policy. Worse, it’s a distraction from the big issues facing the nation, like the deficit, the economy, jobs, gas prices, health care, and on and on, none of which are addressed by the President’s proposals, and none of which he wants to talk about.
Will the President’s tax hike at least tackle the country’s fiscal problems? No, it won’t.
The “Buffett rule” is just plain silly. Investment News notes:
The average tax rate, including payroll taxes, for the middle 20 percent of U.S. families will be 15.9 percent in 2015, according to an estimate by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. Of the 217,000 households that would be affected by the Buffett rule, only 4,000 will have incomes exceeding $1 million and tax rates below 15 percent, under slightly different measures of income and taxes by the center.
Wow… looks like we’re really going to pay that deficit, eh?
We need real solutions. Not distractions like this. This is plain and simple “divide and conquer” “us vs. them” class warfare.