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Why
Doesn’t Warren Buffett Just Write
the Government a Check?
By Cal Thomas
Published August 17, 2011
Warren
Buffett, the multi-billionaire,
thinks he doesn’t pay enough taxes. He wants the government to tax him
more because
he says as a percentage of income he pays less in tax than his
secretary. --
Maybe he should give his secretary a raise.
There
is an Office of Public Debt in
the Treasury Department which exists so that people who think the
government
isn’t already getting enough of their money can pay more. It’s a free
country
(still) so if Warren Buffett thinks government is not getting enough of
his
money, he should write Washington a check. He can then try persuading
other
billionaires, like his friend Bill Gates, to do the same.
Does
Buffett know that even if the
government confiscated all of his wealth and that of every billionaire
and
millionaire in the country, its effect on debt reduction would be
minuscule?
That’s because revenue isn’t the problem; spending is the problem.
Whenever
government gets more of our
money, it doesn’t use it to pay down debt. It spends it on new
programs, or
expands existing ones. Giving more money to government hoping it will
reduce
debt is like giving blood to Dracula, hoping he will stop looking at
our necks.
The
larger question is: Why would
anyone want to send more money to government which is such a poor
steward of
it? If you send your child off to college with an allowance and he
blows it on
partying the first weekend and calls to ask for more, you’d be a fool
to send
it to him. You would be subsidizing wrong decisions and bad behavior.
If
it makes Buffett feel better to
send the government more of his money, let him do so. I’d rather invest
mine in
a way that increases the likelihood of job creation which will then
produce
more in taxes that the government can misspend.
Read
it at FoxNews
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