“Tax Us More”, Millionaires Demand of Congress

| November 16, 2011 | Comments (0)

As the debt supercommittee nears its November 23 deadline to agree on deficit reduction plans, a group of millionaires arrived in the halls of Congress to get this message across: “Tax us more”.

“We want to pay more taxes,” said Doug Edwards, a California millionaire and former marketing director for Google. “If you’re fortunate, and you make more than a million dollars a year, you ought to pay more taxes.”

Millionaires and billionaires across the board – most famously, billionaire Warren Buffet, have asked Congress to raise taxes on the most wealthy in society – themselves.

The main demand of the millionaires “march on Washington” was that the 12-member congressional super committee should raise taxes on millionaires – back to the top marginal tax rate of 39.6%.

The letter was signed by 138 members of “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength.” The group formed a year ago during a failed bid to persuade Congress to end tax cuts for millionaires enacted under President George W. Bush.

The group includes several present and former Google employees. Others include the popular economist, Nouriel Roubini and celebrities such as “The Sopranos” star Edie Falco.

The panel has until next Wednesday (the 23rd) to agree on $1.2 trillion in savings over the next 10 years or risk automatic spending cuts. In practice, they have until Monday, because the Congressional Budget Office requires 48 hours to score any proposal they agree on.

The millionaires all support “The Buffet rule” i.e., the proposal from Warren Buffet that millionaires pay more taxes.

Actually, if President Obama refuses to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, taxes for the rich will indeed rise for the rich on January 1, 2012. These expiring tax cuts – together with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – led to a huge spike in US deficits.

Economist Paul Krugman wrote in 2007 that, “Supply side doctrine, which claimed without evidence that tax cuts would pay for themselves, never got any traction in the world of professional economic research, even among conservatives”.

The visit by the millionaires is unlikely to have any effect on Republicans in the congressional super committee, who, to a man, have signed Grover Norquist’s ‘sacred’ pledge to oppose all taxes, all the time.

Almost all Republican congressional dictated to an unelected individual is where we find ourselves in politics these days. It will thus be a hard road for any agreements in Congress.

a growing number of observers see failure and automatic cuts as a good deal. It would allow the cutting of $600 billion from defense by closing military bases and eliminating useless weapons programs that do more to pad the pockets of defense contractors.

These voices also say it would also force hard cuts in worthless discretional programs (read pork) embedded in every U.S. budget for the last few decades.

By refusing his assent, President Obama could also ensure Bush-era tax cuts are rolled back for the very rich and dare the Republicans to let them expire for the middle class.

What do you think? Would the super committee’s failure to agree represent a problem or an opportunity?

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Category: News and Opinion