The Buffet Rule

The president has become a broken record about the Buffet Rule. Used to be that he claimed Warren Buffet wanted to pay more taxes than his secretary. Now Obama tells us that Ronald Reagan would be on his side in this. I rather doubt that. There was talk of this as a deficit-reduction measure but then someone ran the numbers. The rule would - provided the targets didn't modify their behavior once the tax was passed - raise $47 billion over the next ten years.

Quick math: $47 billion divide by 10 years = $4.7 billion a year. The deficit is somewhere north of $1 trillion dollars, making this less than 0.5% of the deficit. $1.3 trillion becomes $1.295 trillion. Yeah, that's much better. The government is currently spending $3.5 trillion a year. A 0.5% cut (1 penny out of every $2) across the board would reduce the deficit by $17 billion a year, more than triple the impact of the Buffet Rule. Sounds like the Buffet Rule is an election year gimmick that will have no real impact but certainly fuels a class war.

Gimmicky tax increases will not resolve our fiscal problems. However, they might help Obama get re-elected. It serves as yet another distraction from the sputtering economy. There will be no end to the distractions because Obama cannot run on the state of the economy.