Buffett Rips The Buffett Rule

Buffett Rips The Buffett Rule

Warren Buffett came out today and criticized the Obama Administration’s new “Buffett Rule” which would apply a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on individuals making more than a million dollars a year. Buffett thinks more should be done, and said that the Rule was:

a small improvement in a very bad tax system. It doesn’t cure all, it doesn’t cure all revenue problems remotely. In my original article I said we’ve got major problems on the expenditure side. All it does is say that when you’ve got 131 of the 400 largest incomes in the country that are averaging 170 million, you have a third paying taxes at less than 15% counting payroll taxes; that is something that should be corrected.

It would be nice to see GDP galloping at 4 or 5 %. But we’ve had a complete resuscitation of the banking system, in all cases but residential construction we’ve had the economy come back in a very significant way, and month by month it gets better.

So Buffett thinks everything is getting better, yet he also noted that we have major problems on the expenditure side. So what’s a president to do?

The answer might be to stimulate economic growth as well as limit expenditures, but Obama – and Buffett — don’t believe in economic growth. As the American Spectator writes:

The most recent jobs report, in fact, found that the labor force participation rate — that is, the percentage of working-age people with a job or actively looking for work — declined to 63.6 percent in April. “That monthly decrease was the third in a row; and [it] marked the lowest level for that measure since December 1981,” reports Thomas Olson in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Punishing the wealthy has never stimulated more hiring. So is this political chicanery? Let’s hear from the great economic expert in the Oval Office:

There are others who are saying: ‘Well, this is just a gimmick. Just taxing millionaires and billionaires, just imposing the Buffett Rule, won’t do enough to close the deficit.’ Well, I agree.”

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