Yesterday, the liberal local New York paper (LLNYP) published this whiny essay from Warren Buffet claiming that he and his 400 closest economic peers -- the mega-rich he calls them four times -- wouldn't mind being taxed a whole lot more.
By Buffet's own numbers, if we had confiscated all the top 400's earnings in 2008, it would have raised about $0.09T ($90.9B), or about 0.6% of the 2011 federal deficit. That's if we take every dollar of it, not just tax it at the highest rate for earned income of 35%, since that would raise only 0.2% of the deficit.
Kinda makes you wonder: if Buffet's so rich, how come he's not smart?
Buffet's argument is that since we tax capital gains at only 15%, he and his fellow mega-rich unfairly pay a lower average tax rate than working people who earn salary and bonuses or current profits. Of course, if Buffet's self-directed class warfare were to pay off and Obama were to get his tax rate increases targeted at those who make over $200,000 a year, the vast majority of the new taxes paid would come not from those 400, but from the small businesses owned and operated by the entrepreneurial self-employed men and women who create most of the new jobs in our economy.
I suggest that if Buffet feels that way -- and he probably does since the bulk of his Berkshire Hathaway holding company investments are in large businesses -- he should contribute an extra 20% to the U. S. Treasury, and shut up!
Then Sunday, speaking on Fareed Zakaria's CNN talking-heads show, the LLNYP's columnist and fellow Obama Nobel Prize awardee Paul Krugman said we could have an economic boom if only we believed for eighteen months that space aliens were coming!
No. Really! You can't make this stuff up. It's not that no one would believe you, but rather that no imagined statement could match the craziness of Krugman's real ones. You just can't put crazier words in a progressivist's mouth than he will put there himself.
Space aliens? To break all our windows, perhaps? If only.
I nominate Krugman for the Ig Nobel Prize in Economic Stupidity, and I hope his award will include a visit from the spirit of Frederic Bastiat to explain the broken window paradox.
Bastiat's parable explains why we wouldn't end that period of eighteen months better off after exerting a substantial fraction of our productive capacity building a fleet of spaceships, developing and deploying a force field generator, and bioengineering an enhanced rhinovirus to help us defeat aliens who don't show up, because we'd lose what that capacity could otherwise produce.
Early in the previous century, John Maynard Keynes wrote that silliness Fareed Zakaria quotes in the video clip, claiming we'd all be better off if we just paid lots of crews of men to dig ditches and lots of others to come right along behind and fill them up. After that, in-their-own-mind-elite politicians, writers, and academics of the day echoed it in order to justify their cherished takeover and subsequent destruction of our free vibrant, productive, economic system. Today, even the Nobel Prize winners are compelled to repeat it.
Now that I think about it, I also nominate Krugman for the Nobel Prize Committee's first award revocation.
