Today’s Gatewood (and anti-Gatewood) go to . . .

by David Safier

I have created The Gatewood in honor of Henry Gatewood, the banker in John Ford's 1939 "Stagecoach" who ran off with $50,000 in payroll money and said, while clutching the satchel full of stolen money,

"'America for Americans! The government must not interfere with business! Reduce taxes! Our national debt is something shocking!"

Video at the end of the post.

Today's Gatewood goes to FreedomWorks, whose slogan reads,

"Lower Taxes. Less Government. More Freedom."

Liars and villains after his own heart. Gatewood would have been proud.

I'm not sure how often I'll be giving out The Anti-Gatewood, which stands the old embezzler's villainy on its head, but today's much-deserved award goes to Warren Buffett, one of the world's richest men, who has an oped in today's NY Times, Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

[snip]

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

A rich man telling the truth, and demanding that he and others like him pay their fair share. Gatewood would have been horrified.

Here's Gatewood, in his own words.