E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Why They Hate Warren Buffett

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_they_hate_warren_buffett_20110928/

Why They Hate Warren Buffett

Posted on Sep 28, 2011

White House / Pete Souza

President Obama meets with Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, in the Oval Office.

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.


snip//

No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hate Warren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of the tax system against labor; (2) the fact that in comparison to middle- or upper-middle class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes; and (3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.

And it’s worth noticing that while conservatives who talk about religion get a lot of coverage—and I will always defend their freedom to speak of faith in the public square—what really get the juices flowing on the right these days are tax rates. I’m not sure that a politician who renounced the Almighty would get nearly the attention Buffett has received for his renunciation of low capital gains taxes.

Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to “punish” the successful. Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at a recent town hall event in California to raise his taxes, are saying that none of us succeeds solely because of personal effort. We are all lucky to have been born in—or, for immigrants, been admitted to—a country where the rule of law is strong, where property is safe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where government protects our liberties.

Wealthy people, by definition, have done better out of this system than other people have. They ought to be willing to join Buffett and Edwards in arguing that for this reason alone, it is common sense, not class jealousy, to ask the most fortunate to pay taxes at higher tax rates than other people do. It is for this heresy that Buffett is being harassed.

[rfranklin]

1. Morning Joe response...

"I don't hate Warren Buffet..." followed by

"Dionne was so mean to George Bush and so loving to Obama" while totally ignoring the message of the opinion piece.

[LiberalFighter]

2. But Michelle Bachmann

I think you earned every dollar, you should get to keep every dollar that you earn. That's your money, that's not the government's money. That's the whole point. Barack Obama seems to think that when we earn money it belongs to him, and we're lucky just to keep a little bit of it. I don't think that at all. I think when people make money it's their money.

[indepat]

3. I betcha O'Bachmann doesn't believe that social security and Medicare benefits people have paid for

all of their typical 40-year working lives are benefits they have earned and should be kept rather than being gutted to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations. If so, how convenient. :patriot:

[maxsolomon]

4. What pays her salary?

Why doesn't she return it to "people" if it belongs to them?