President Obama to propose the ‘Buffett Rule’ for millionaires

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

“It's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.” (Warren Buffett, 2006)

Steve Benen writes at the Political Animal – Obama to push ‘Buffett Rule’ in debt speech:

About a month ago, Warren Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, made a strong case in support of raising taxes on those who enjoy enormous wealth. He noted, among other things, that he has a lower tax burden, as a percentage of his income, than anyone in his office. Millionaires and billionaires, Buffett said, “have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.”

It looks President Obama is inclined to agree.

President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials.

With a special joint Congressional committee starting work to reach a bipartisan budget deal by late November, the proposal adds a new and populist feature to Mr. Obama’s effort to raise the political pressure on Republicans to agree to higher revenues from the wealthy in return for Democrats’ support of future cuts from Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule.”

Republican talking heads were out in force on the Sunday talk shows (where only Republicans are welcome) to preemptively shout "class warfare!," just as Warren Buffett wryly observed in 2006.

Steve Benen continues at the Political Animal – The ‘Buffett Rule’ vs. ‘Class Warfare’:

We don’t yet know the details of the proposal — most notably, what the new millionaires’ minimum tax rate would be — but Republicans are already responding with predictable disgust.

Here, for example, was House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) yesterday on Fox News, making the case for coddling millionaires and billionaires for a while longer. See if you can pick up on the subtlety of his talking points.

“Class warfare, Chris, may make for really good politics but it makes a rotten economics. We don’t need a system that seeks to divide people. […]

“[I]t looks like the president wants to move down the class warfare path. Class warfare will simply divide this country more. It will attack job creators, divide people and it doesn’t grow the economy. […]

“[I]f we are just going to do class warfare and trying to get tax increases out of this, and I don’t think much will come of it…. He’s in a political class warfare mode and campaign mode.” 

So, I guess I’ll put him down as a “maybe” on the Buffett Rule?

By any reasonable measure, Ryan’s arguments aren’t just wrong, they’re borderline offensive.

For a generation, Republican policymakers have rigged national tax policy to reward the wealthy, and then reward them some more. We’ve seen the class gap reach Gilded Era levels, only to hear GOP officials again demand that working families “sacrifice” while lavishing more breaks on the very wealthy.

Remind me, who’s engaged in “class warfare” and “dividing people”?

Also note the larger policy context here. President Obama wants the richest of the rich to pay a little more, but keep tax breaks in place for the middle class. Paul Ryan and his cohorts want the polar opposite — more breaks for the very wealthy and higher taxes for the middle class.

Let’s also not forget that one of the GOP’s more common tax-policy arguments is that nearly half the country doesn’t have any federal income tax burden — and they see that as a problem that needs fixing. As a practical matter, the Republican argument on this is practically the definition of “class warfare.”

I realize much of the political establishment has come to look at Paul Ryan as a wise wonk who deserves to be taken seriously, but it really doesn’t take much to realize how spectacularly wrong the far-right Wisconsinite really is.

Just how spectacularly wrong we have been over many times. The so-called "job creators" have created no jobs in America for over a decade. Massive tax cuts for corporations and the über-rich "investor class" have created no jobs in America for over a decade. Transfering more of the wealth of the middle-class to corporations and the über-rich will only impoverish the middle-class and worsen the income disparity in this country, which is already the worst it has been since 1929. The plutocrats will not be satisfied until they have reduced the United States to a third-world banana republic run by a corporatocracy.

For the economic analysis complete with lots of charts and graphs, see Jon Perr at perrspectives.com:

PERRspectives: Republicans Declare Generational War for 2012

PERRspectives: Boehner Peddles Republican Job Creators Myth

PERRspectives: Republicans Call for Gutting Social Security, Adding Trillions to Debt

PERRspectives: Low Capital Gains Taxes Fueling Record Income Inequality

Just say no to GOP economics!