The U.S. Senate could vote today on the gimmicky distraction known as the Buffett Rule — President Obama’s plan to raise taxes on wealthy Americans and job creators in order to supposedly bring “fairness” to the tax code and pay down the debt. As the paper-thin justification for the proposal continues to fade away, the American people are staring down Tax Day, continued joblessness, and the prospect of a major tax meltdown coming on January 1, 2013.
The facts of the Buffett Rule are simple. The President wants millionaires (and small businesses taxed as individuals) to pay a minimum tax of 30 percent. For all of his rhetoric that the measure would “stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade,” the Buffett Rule would bring in only $47 billion in revenue in ten years. To put those numbers in context, President Obama’s budget calls for adding $6.7 trillion to the national debt. So the Buffett Rule would cover just 0.007% of all of Obama’s debt and .001% of Obama’s spending.
None of this even touches on the failure in logic underlying the President’s argument, as we detailed in depth last week. In short, President Obama is employing the Buffett Rule as an election-year class warfare weapon. And he’s aiming it at the highest-earning families and businesses in America who are already shouldering the vast majority of the country’s tax burden. Just one example: The top 1 percent of income earners — those earning more than $380,000 in 2008 — paid more than 38 percent of all federal income taxes while earning 20 percent of all income.
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