Buffet rule would generate $47 billion, GOP unimpressed
By Chris in Paris on 3/21/2012 11:45:00 AM
Of course they're unimpressed, because it generates a much more significant amount of money than the GOP plans to tax the poor and middle class. Forget all of the GOP talk about how there are so many Americans who don't pay taxes and ought to pay taxes even though taxing them would never come close to solving any financial problems. Here's a plan that actually delivers, so naturally the GOP hates it. Bloomberg:
Implementing a “Buffett rule” to require a minimum 30 percent tax rate for the highest U.S. earners would raise $47 billion over the next decade, according to a government projection.
The estimate for the proposal backed by President Barack Obama comes from the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s scorekeepers. Lawmakers updated the projection late today to reflect different assumptions about how taxpayers would adjust their capital gains realizations from an earlier $31 billion version.
“The president’s so-called Buffett rule is a dog that just won’t hunt,” Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a statement, adding that the proposal would have little effect on reducing the federal budget deficit. “It was designed for no other reason than politics. There is no economic rationale for it.”
Uh huh, the politics of raising $47 billion. Who needs it, right?