In Case You Missed It, Liberal Karl Rove Hates Conservatives' Guts

It doesn't matter which party they come from, they are all alike.

He has since apologized.

The eruption was reported here.

Warren Buffett's 2010 Tax Bill Was $6.9 Million. Was That 'At Least As Much As His Secretary's'?

The details of Warren Buffett's taxes for 2010 were only partially revealed last August and became the subject of critical examination, as for example here:

Buffett also said his federal income tax bill came to $6,923,494, or 17.4% of his taxable income -- two points he revealed in a New York Times op-ed in August urging Congress to tax the wealthy more. ... [But t]he current tax system already satisfies the Buffett Rule. Americans on average pay 16% of their total income in federal income and payroll taxes, while millionaires pay an average of 20.1%, according to the Tax Policy Center.

The Tax Policy Center is a generally more liberal think tank than The Tax Foundation.

The president's statement in last night's State of the Union deliberately suggests Buffett's secretary paid more in taxes than Buffett did when you know that that is completely disingenuous as well as inconceivable:

Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.

Common nonsense.

Does Roseanne Even Know How Few People Make Over $100 Million Per Year?

The answer for 2009 was something fewer than 72, according to data published a year ago by socialsecurity.gov, here, which reveals only the aggregate number making beyond $50 million.

Just 72 individuals made in excess of $50 million in 2009, with an average wage of $84 million. In 2008 the number making in excess of $50 million was 131, with an average wage of $91 million. And in 2007 it was 151 people, with an average wage of almost $94 million.

The last time the average wage of the highest wage earners exceeded $100 million was in the year 2000 when 91 heavy hitters averaged $111 million in wages.

For a successful woman whose eponymous show went off the air in 1997 and is (conveniently for this discussion) worth $80 million, she sure doesn't grasp the difference between a wealth tax and a confiscatory income tax on high earners:

"I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million [of] personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount of that amount then they should, you know, go to the reeducation camps and if that doesn't help, then being beheaded," Barr said with a straight face.

The video of the harridan is here.

The country has about 400 billionaires, but $1 billion invested conservatively at 3.0 percent nets just $30 million a year, and $3 billion nets $90 million a year, which could easily be the situation for 286 people on Forbes' famous list of the 400 richest Americans.

And by the way, in the top 100 this year, I count just two whose primary business is banking.

Herman Cain Comes Closest to a True Flat Tax

So says Stephen Moore for The Wall Street Journal, here, pointing out that FICA taxes do go in the shredder under Cain's 999 plan:

But the candidate who comes closest to a true flat tax is Herman Cain, the former Godfather's Pizza CEO. His argument for a "9-9-9" plan puts the current income and payroll taxes in the shredder and replaces them with a 9% personal income tax with no deductions, a 9% net business income tax, and a 9% national sales tax.

That would be rocket fuel for the economy, though the combination of a federal sales tax and an income tax is a big worry. But at least Mr. Cain has super-sized solutions to an economy with super-sized problems.

Solution? In 2008 Cain's 999 plan would have meant 900 billion fewer dollars in receipts for federal social insurance. I don't see how he could make up that difference, let alone an additional $300+ billion he comes up short compared to what was actually collected in 2008.

It looks more like a stealth plan to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare by ignoring it.

• A 9 percent tax on $8.50 trillion in adjusted gross incomes in 2008 comes to $765 billion (actual collected in 2008 was $1.03 trillion).

This is actually a huge tax cut on the wealthy and a big tax increase on everyone else. And does Cain intend to do away with deductions even for IRAs and 401Ks? If so that AGI number would be much higher, and the tax revenue higher, along with your tax bill. At least the billionaire will pay the same rate as the janitor, as Obama now famously says he wants.

• A 9 percent tax on $1.25 trillion in corporate profits comes to $113 billion (actual collected was $309 billion).

This is a huge tax cut on business, which is why Stephen Moore calls Cain's plan rocket fuel.

• A 9 percent tax on $4.40 trillion in total retail and food service consumer spending in 2008 comes to $396 billion. 

Does Cain intend this to be wider in scope than indicated? It is often said that 70 percent of the economy is consumer spending. In a $15 trillion economy, that's $10.5 trillion. A 9 percent tax on that would boost the receipts of a national sales tax to $945 billion.

But all told, Cain's plan would have collected only $1.274 trillion in federal revenue for 2008 when the government actually collected $2.5 trillion and still ran a deficit of close to $400 billion anyway.

We're currently spending $3.8 trillion in this country under Obama, $1 trillion more than in 2008. The 999 plan doesn't look up to the task.

While Warren Buffett Wants To Raise Your Taxes, He's Been Fighting His Since 2002

So says The New York Post here:

Billionaire Warren Buffett says folks like him should have to pay more taxes -- but it turns out his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, hasn’t paid what it’s already owed for years. ...

[T]he company openly admits that it owes back taxes since as long ago as 2002.

“We anticipate that we will resolve all adjustments proposed by the US Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) for the 2002 through 2004 tax years ... within the next 12 months,” the firm’s annual report says.

It also cites outstanding tax issues for 2005 through 2009. ...

Obama, and co-conspirators like Buffett, claim to want to slap only “millionaires and billionaires.” ...

Obama’s hikes on “millionaires and billionaires” actually start with folks earning as little as $200,000.

Buffett's annual report states he is fighting the IRS over $1 billion in unpaid taxes.

Obama's Lies on Taxes Obvious Even to the Associated Press

Today, in a fact-check piece by Stephen Ohlemacher :

President Barack Obama makes it sound as if there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.

"Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires," Obama said Monday. "That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that."

The data tell a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

The rest summarizes all the data, here.

Another Voice Wrongly Claiming 'The Money is in the Middle'

Brian Wesbury at The DC, here:

What most people don’t realize is that the U.S. has gorged so much (boosting spending from roughly 18% of GDP in 2000 to 24% of GDP today), that the only way to pay for it is to tax the middle class. ...

The money is in the middle. And the only way our politicians can get it is to follow Europe’s lead and institute a national sales tax or Value-Added Tax (VAT). This is the elephant in the room that is never talked about. Those who are using the debt ceiling in an attempt to cut spending are actually saving the middle class from tax hikes — not the millionaires and billionaires.


It's a frequently repeated claim that the money is in the middle, but it's just not true, no matter how often  it is said.

If all the (reported) income in America were poured into a giant hour glass, you'd have to start it and wait about twenty minutes to begin to visualize how all the money is actually distributed.

A snapshot taken at that moment would show $5.7 trillion in adjusted gross income still in the top, and $2.8 trillion in AGI in the bottom. The kicker is that 35 million tax returns split what's on top, while the remaining 105 million tax returns, 75 percent of the total, divvy up what's on the bottom.

The money's definitely not "in the middle."

It's hard to get agreement on what's middle class in America, especially since it is a conceit of our society that everyone is middle class. The rich aspire down to it to escape notice, the poor up to it to escape the indignities of dependence.

But no matter what smoke anyone tries to blow up your bottom, the biggest single pile of money remains with the top 25 percent:

Top 10 percent = 14 million tax returns (10 percent of the total) = $3.9 trillion in AGI
The next 25-10 percent = 21 million tax returns (15 percent of the total) = $1.8 trillion in AGI

The next 50-25 percent = 35 million tax returns (25 percent of the total) = $1.7 trillion in AGI
The bottom 50 percent = 70 million tax returns (50 percent of the total) = $1.1 trillion in AGI.

It's ridiculous to think that a VAT tax will somehow generate huge piles of new tax revenue on the backs of the middle class.  The VAT will hurt them just like Social Security and Medicare taxes hurt them because it's regressive, not because they have a lot of untapped money they're going to be parting with.

Considering how much tax evasion there already is in America of the unreported income variety, variously estimated (here at $2 trillion, resulting in a tax gap of $500 billion), a VAT will fail simply because it will drive more and more of the economy underground where cash is king and credit cards, checks, invoices and receipts are anathema. Think of it as the inverse of how the rich escape high rates of taxation, for example by shifting to capital gains away from ordinary income. A quicker way to become Greece I cannot think of.

Setting money free to move around openly is the key to an effective tax policy. But bringing it out into the open where it can be captured and taxed depends on perceptions of fairness.

As long as too many people think some people should pay taxes at a higher rate just because they have more, we're not going to get there. 

Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski Wanted Florida Republican Shot

According to this October 23, 2010 report in The Scranton Times Tribune:

"That Scott down there that's running for governor of Florida," Mr. Kanjorski said. "Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida. He's a millionaire and a billionaire. He's no hero. He's a damn crook. It's just we don't prosecute big crooks."

Kanjorski was defeated for his Pennsylvania District 11 US House seat in November by Lou Barletta 45 percent to 55 percent.