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Townhall...
I’m
for The Rich
By Mona Charen
9/20/2011
President
Obama and the Democrats are
finally happy. Liberated from thoughts of compromise with Republicans,
they can
fully indulge their most lascivious pleasure -- trashing rich people.
“We
simply cannot afford these special lower rates for the wealthy,”
President
Obama declared in his Rose Garden message Monday.
“Give
‘em hell, Barry,” cheered
Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker. Hertzberg was chipper. Not so of
Paul
Krugman from The New York Times, the Democratic Party’s choleric scold:
“The
rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office,”
he
glowered. “. . .And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of
entitlement has taken hold: It’s their money, and they have the right
to keep
it.” Imagine.
The
president, brimming with
indignation, asserts that hedge fund managers are paying taxes at a
lower rate
than teachers and firefighters. “How can you defend that?” he demands.
You
don’t have to defend that, because
it isn’t true. This synthetic outrage about the taxes paid by the
super-rich --
the so-called Buffett Rule -- is the greatest waste of political time
and
energy in recent memory.
As
Stephen Moore, an economics writer
for The Wall Street Journal, has observed, we cannot know with
certainty what
Warren Buffett paid in taxes. (And he is certainly free to write a
larger check
to the IRS.) But “according to the Congressional Budget Office,
middle-class
families in 2007, earning between $34,000 and $50,000, paid an
effective 14.3
percent of their income in all federal taxes. The top 5 percent of
income
earners paid 27.9 percent and the top 1 percent paid 29.5 percent. And
what
about the highest earners? Americans with annual incomes above $2
million paid
an average 32 percent of their income in federal taxes in 2005 (the
most recent
year for which data are available).”
In
2008, Charlie Gibson questioned
President Obama about his desire to raise the capital gains tax. Gibson
reminded candidate Obama that presidents Clinton and Bush had reduced
the
capital gains tax rate. “And in each instance, when the rate dropped,
revenues
from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the
1980s,
when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So
why raise
it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this
country
own stock and would be affected?”
“Well
Charlie,” Obama replied, “What
I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for
purposes of
fairness.”
So
it isn’t a matter of raising
revenue -- and by most estimates, the amount raised by a millionaires
surtax
would be trifling compared with the size of the national debt -- it’s a
matter
of sticking it to those guys with the “belligerent sense of
entitlement”
towards their right to own property.
Well,
I’m for the rich, and not just
because the top 1 percent of earners in America paid 38 percent of
income taxes
in 2008. And not just because I suspect that attempting to tax the rich
more
will only lead to more tax avoidance, not more tax revenues for the
federal
government. I’m for the rich because, with some exceptions, they’ve
earned
their money. A Prince and Associates study found that only 10 percent
of
multimillionaires had inherited their wealth...
Read
the rest of the column at
Townhall
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