Yet Another Big Lie

Greetings from the Left Coast.

There are several Big Lies that I'm getting really tired of hearing, but very near the top of the list is the one that says we could address our budget problems if only the "rich" would pay their fair share. If they were only willing to pay a little more, we could solve this thing - but those evil Republicans keep "coddling" them, to use Warren Buffett's words. The trouble is, the math just doesn't work.

Let's set aside, for the moment, the point that if Warren Buffett really thinks his taxes are too low, he could send a check to the U.S. Treasury at any time, and look at the facts and figures provided by the Internal Revenue Service.

According to the IRS, in 2009, 235,413 people filed tax returns reporting a million dollars or more in income. In aggregate, those people earned $726.9 billion. The federal deficit in 2009 was roughly $1.4 trillion. That means if you had taken all of the reported income away from those 235,413 people who made a million dollars or more, it would only have covered about half of the federal deficit for that year.

I'm not sure exactly how much more in taxes Mr. Buffett thinks he should be paying, but I seriously doubt that he is willing to contribute 100% of his income. So the fact of the matter is that making the rich (or better yet, the "super-rich") pay just a little bit more would be a proverbial drop in the proverbial bucket compared to our current level of deficit spending.

Here's another tidbit to think about. If you make $160,000 or more, you're in the top 5% of earners in America. You and your fellow five-percenters already pay almost 60% of all income taxes collected. (And the other 95% of taxpayers would like to thank you for your disproportionate contribution, especially the bottom 50% who paid almost nothing.) In aggregate, you and your fellow five-percenters earned slightly under $3 trillion. Therefore, if the government had taken all of your money, it wouldn't have been enough to cover Obama's budget.

So let's be honest about this. If you want to punish the rich people for being so successful by taking more of their money away, if that would somehow make you feel better, just say so. If you believe in income redistribution - that money should be taken from people who have earned it and given to people who have not earned it - just say so. But stop pretending that this is will somehow magically solve our massive deficit problem. It's class warfare, plain and simple. As many others have observed, we don't have a deficit problem because taxes are too low - we have a deficit problem because spending is too high. And "taxing the rich" won't solve the problem, because all of the rich people put together don't earn enough money to eliminate the deficit even if we took all of it! Don't buy into the Big Lie.

Thanks for listening.