Confirmed: it really is about class warfare

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We knew it all along, however, credit them for their honesty but the White House finally admitted that higher taxes on the rich via the Buffet rule has nothing to do with deficit reduction or paying down the debt.

Introducing a minimum 30 percent income tax on millionaires “was never our plan to bring the deficit down and get the debt under control,” Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters on a conference call Monday afternoon. “This is not the president’s entire tax plan. We’re not trying to say this solves all our economic problems, all our budget problems.”

Making the argument for the rule based on billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s argument that it’s wrong for him to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary, President Barack Obama said in the State of the Union address in January that paying the “fair share of taxes” was necessary for a “sense of shared responsibility. That’s how we’ll reduce our deficit.”

If the President is going to keep trotting out the ridiculous "Buffet rule" chimera, we're going to keep knocking it down... with joy in our heart and a smile upon our face.


Buffet only pays himself a salary of $100,000 which is far, far less than what he pays his secretary, so naturally, not only is Buffet paying less in taxes than his secretary he is also paying less of a percentage of his salary in taxes than his secretary.

Buffet receives most of his income from capital gains which is taxed at 15 percent which is far lower than the highest income tax rate. So, Buffet could simply grant himself, say, a salary of $1 million, thus paying more in taxes and he and the President could quit making clowns of themselves. But, no, Buffet is a) acting in his best rational self-interest by shielding as much of his income as possible from taxation and is b) allowing himself to be a pinata for the benefit his BFF's re-election campaign.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) slammed the bill late last month, after the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the rule would generate $46.7 billion in revenues over the next decade.

“It was designed for no other reason than politics — there is no economic rationale for it,” Hatch said in a statement. “I hope the president will stop the class warfare and start leading by putting out real proposals to bring down our debt.”

But in the Monday conference call, Furman said that sum wasn’t too shabby.

“We think $47 billion is a meaningful amount of money to most Americans,” he said.

$47 billion sounds like a big number until you realize that is the alleged revenue generated over 10 years and with the way Obama spends money, that represents less than one percent of the $6.4 trillion in projected deficits during that same time period.

So, yeah, better stick with the "fairness"/class warfare angle because the numbers are laughable.

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Income inequality by the numbers

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Via Rich Lowry:

1.1 : the millions of dollars new White House Chief of Staff, Jacob Lew, made from Citigroup in one year, recently.


8.7 : the millions of dollars former Chief of Staff, William Daley, made in roughly one-year of work for JPMorgan Chase.


5.1 : the millions of dollars former administration economic advisor, Larry Summers made for managing a hedge fund.


16.1 : the millions of dollars Rahm Emanuel made from working for an investment firm.


2-3 : the millions of dollars former budget director Peter Orszag will pull down from Citigroup.


7 : the millions of dollars current national security advisor, Tom Donilon, made for his work at Fannie Mae back in 2000-2003.

Perhaps this class warfare exercised of late by the President is rather of the self-loathing variety.


However, good to know some people are prospering in this sluggish economy. Maybe it really is, who you know.




Lowry's exit question:

Is it too much to ask that one high-profile Obama official leave government and refuse to make more than $70,000 a year out of solidarity with the middle class and commitment to income equality? Of course it is. Just as the definition of a recession is when someone else loses a job, greed is when someone else makes a lot of money. For anyone hoping to get to the top, the collective message of current and former Obama officials should be clear: Do as they do, not as they say.

* Stephanie Cutter: adviser to the Obama reelection campaign who wrote a critique the other day regarding Mitt Romney’s days at Bain Capital, subtitled “Profit at Any Cost" and who herself served as a spokeswoman for J.C. Flowers... a private equity firm.

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Photo image of the day

Occupy Boston protesters yesterday.

Well, that's at least one thing we agree upon.

Traitor?

Mark Cuban, bazillionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has got quite a bit of run from a blog post he put up few days ago where he exhorted everone to get rich so they can pay a lot of taxes.

Some excerpts:

Bust your ass and get rich.

Make a boatload of money. Pay your
taxes. Lots of taxes. Hire people. Train people. Pay people. Spend money on rent, equipment, services. Pay more taxes.

When you make a shitload of money. Do something positive with it. If you are smart enough to make it, you will be smart enough to know where to put it to work.
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So be Patriotic. Go out there and get rich. Get so obnoxiously rich that when that tax bill comes , your first thought will be to choke on how big a check you have to write. Your 2nd thought will be “what a great problem to have”, and your 3rd should be a recognition that in paying your taxes you are helping to support millions of Americans that are not as fortunate as you.
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I’m not saying that the government’s use of tax money is the most efficient use of our hard-earned capital. It obviously is not. In a perfect world, there would be a better option. We don’t live in a perfect world. We don’t live in a perfect time. We live in a time where the government plays a big role in an effort to help lead us out this Great Recession. That’s reality.

So I will repeat my point. Get out there and make a boatload of money. Enjoy the shit out your money. Pay your taxes.

It’s the most Patriotic thing you can do.

We like Cuban. We're praying for the day when he will be able to buy the Dodgers from that noxious pair, Frank and Jamie McCourt. And we're glad he appears to realize that private enterprise (such as his own) is far more efficient at taking care of the well-being and livlihood of people than the government (which begs for why it is he wrote this blog post in the first place) but saying paying your taxes is the most patriotic thing you can do? Got it.

After hearing stories of bravery and heroism displayed by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan or remembering 9-11 and sacrifices made by the passengers of Flight 93 and the first responders at the World Trade Center, that has to be one of the most patently ridiculous statements we have heard in quite some time.

Our friend "Sherry" advised us that perhaps Cuban was referring only to the rest of us "civilians". Perhaps... but it's still ridiculous to assert that merely obeying the law is somehow patriotic. Hey there, Patriot, thanks for not jay-walking.

And if paying taxes is the most patriotic thing you can do, then Warren Buffet who grants himself a salary of only $100,000 should be guilty of treason.

Of course, liberals are just eating up what Cuban wrote because it's a narrative that fits quite nicely into the President's call for more taxes on the rich. But Obama’s call to raise taxes on the rich is so shamelessly cynical, it’s pathetic. He knows that he’s not going to come anywhere close to closing the deficit on the backs of the rich. Like Buffet, the rich will alter their behavior and/or use the tax code to legally shelter their assets so they won't have to pay those higher taxes. That is just how things work whether statists want to acknowledge it or not.

At the end of the day, whether the President actually believes taxing the rich will somehow improve our economic outlook and/or reduce the deficit is irrelevant. Like the story of the scorpion and the frog, “class warfare” is just what he does. He can’t help himself.

The pitchfork-wielding mob is back!

A series of blunders and missteps at the beginning of the Obama administration last spring temporarily slowed-down the Congressional/Obama administration lynch mob’s pursuit of Big Finance but they have regrouped and are back this year with a vengeance:

Mindful of soaring deficits and an anti-Wall Street mood, President Barack Obama wants a new 10-year tax on the country's largest banks to cover a projected $117 billion shortfall in the government's financial crisis bailout fund.

The president planned to propose Thursday a levy of 15 basis points, or 0.15 percent, on the liabilities of large financial institutions to make sure every dollar spent from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program to rescue Wall Street firms, auto companies and mortgage holders is either repaid or paid for. Congress would have to approve the tax.

A senior administration official said the tax, which officials are calling a "financial crisis responsibility fee," would apply only to financial companies with assets of more than $50 billion. Those firms - estimated to amount to about 50 institutions - would have to pay the fee even though many did not accept any taxpayer assistance and most others already paid back their government infusions.

(italics, ours)

Unlike our current judicial system that views the law through the prism of race, gender and sexual orientation as obliged by hate crime laws, mob justice is indeed blind such that even if you never received a single dollar of TARP money, if you are above that wholly arbitrary $50 billion threshold…. You are still guilty. It’s a beautiful thing.

General Motors, as would be expected, is spared the rod.

Bankers did not hide their objections.

"Using tax policy to punish people is a bad idea," Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., told reporters even before details of the tax were known.
"It would be very hard for the industry to pay for the auto companies," Dimon added. "I mean, at one point you have to be a little fair."

Come now, Mr. Dimon, don’t be such a poor sport. After the President, just yesterday, finished greasing the unions to get them to support Obamacare, did you actually think the mob would take anything out on the auto manufacturing unions.

And really it would be entirely consistent with the fact that under Obamacare, we will by paying for someone’s else’s healthcare who was lucky enough to be in a favored and thus exempted political class.

This practice of fanning the flames of enmity and antagonism against a particular class such as the Wall St. bankers and simultaneously favoring another class such as the unions is perfectly in keeping with the fascist and Marxist characteristics of perpetual class warfare.

What you only read about in history books, you get to see live, right before your very eyes!




Once again, we will take an operational pause to reach out to friends who bought into Hope’n’Change. With a generosity of spirit and with malice towards none, we extend the hand of friendship to those who really did think it would no longer be “business as usual”.

Unfortunately, as we now know, we have been dealt a hand of that same “business as usual” but on human growth hormones with an exploding of government influence and power that devoured large portions the auto and financial sectors and which stands poised to take over the healthcare industry in a process so cynical, so secretive and so rendered by bribery, corruption and outright backroom whoring that it symbolizes the very antithesis of what Barack Hussein Obama promised and has indeed come to symbolize the Obama presidency itself.