Donna Summer Sausage
"While the incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans--those earning $380,000 or more--have grown by 33 percent over the past 20 years, the income growth for the other 90 percent of Americans, including the middle class, has been at a virtual standstill."--Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto
Nearly a year after Warren Buffett published his editorial in the New York Times, "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich," in which he advocated a more progressive system of taxation, I still see or hear mention of it on occasion. I just skimmed through it again this morning, and all I could think was "So what?" A generous interpretation would be that a member of the super-rich committed class treason and became an advocate for working Americans. But I don't think I would be that generous with my interpretation. Words are cheap. While his editorial went viral, his company Berkshire Hathaway was spending millions on lobbying. I imagine that that lobbying produced more results than his fifteen paragraphs of largesse.
There's another reason I remain unimpressed. The editorial's focus on unfair taxation ignores the problem spoken of in my epigraph: wealth has been concentrating more and more at the top while everyone below--the vast majority of Americans--is treading water or gradually sinking. The economy itself is built on redistributing money upwards, allowing the owner and investor class to live off the wealth created by the middle and working classes. Buffett focuses conveniently and single-mindedly on regressive taxation engineered by "a billionaire-friendly Congress," but the whole system is unfair, not just the system of taxation incidental to it.
Real economic justice isn't going to flow from the pen of Buffett or anyone else in his class, and it probably won't be treated well in the pages of the New York Times.
Nearly a year after Warren Buffett published his editorial in the New York Times, "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich," in which he advocated a more progressive system of taxation, I still see or hear mention of it on occasion. I just skimmed through it again this morning, and all I could think was "So what?" A generous interpretation would be that a member of the super-rich committed class treason and became an advocate for working Americans. But I don't think I would be that generous with my interpretation. Words are cheap. While his editorial went viral, his company Berkshire Hathaway was spending millions on lobbying. I imagine that that lobbying produced more results than his fifteen paragraphs of largesse.
There's another reason I remain unimpressed. The editorial's focus on unfair taxation ignores the problem spoken of in my epigraph: wealth has been concentrating more and more at the top while everyone below--the vast majority of Americans--is treading water or gradually sinking. The economy itself is built on redistributing money upwards, allowing the owner and investor class to live off the wealth created by the middle and working classes. Buffett focuses conveniently and single-mindedly on regressive taxation engineered by "a billionaire-friendly Congress," but the whole system is unfair, not just the system of taxation incidental to it.
Real economic justice isn't going to flow from the pen of Buffett or anyone else in his class, and it probably won't be treated well in the pages of the New York Times.