The Absurd 'Buffett Tax' Proposal: Warren Buffett Meets Karl Marx

Charlie Gasparino takes a good swing at the absurd Buffett Tax:

Aspects of the new plan remain scant, but what we do know isn’t good. It’s supposed to be a tax on income, so instead of making the tax system less convoluted (as Obama’s own bipartisan deficit commission proposed), he’s looking to make it more complicated with a new tax bracket.

Thing is, taxing income won’t get squat from the president’s favorite limousine liberal, Warren Buffett -- the guy who supposedly inspired Obama’s plan. Buffett doesn’t collect most of his money as the normal income that the tax would hit. (His salary is just $100,000 a year.)

Sure, Buffett has a strong record when it comes to picking winners in the stock market through his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway -- although he’s also building a strong record in the area of economic hypocrisy lately.

He is, after all, the same guy who defended the feckless rating agencies over their disastrous mortgage-backed-securities ratings that did so much to lay the ground for the 2008 financial collapse. (He also held a major position in one of them.)

He recently defended the sleazy trading by one of his now former fund managers who purchased shares of a company just before Buffett agreed to buy the company for Berkshire -- then recanted his support after regulators launched an inquiry into the deal.

Now, Buffett says millionaires like himself need to pay more taxes to pay for the president’s economic fixes.

OK, forget the hypocrisy that Buffett at 81 has already made his many billions so he couldn’t really care less how much he’s taxed. Forget, too, that since he makes most of his income through investments, this tax apparently won’t affect him or his Wall Street buddies much at all.

And forget that the plan appears to be nothing more than a class-warfare gimmick to bolster the president’s low approval ratings.

And that even a tax increase on millionaires has zero chance of passing the GOP-controlled Congress -- because it couldn’t pass the old Democratic Congress.

Bottom line: Increasing taxes on anyone is a terrible thing. A progressive tax, however, is right out of the Communist Manifesto:

In the Manifesto, Karl Marx details 10 key items that will advance Communism. Point 2 is:

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

But beyond the communist view that feeds the call for such a tax is the simple fact that taking money from the most productive elements of society and turning it over to the bureaucratic governmnet wasteland. It is like turning farmland over to locusts. It's beyond just the taking. It is destruction , and in the case of government, provides more fuel to exercise totalitarian measures against all of us.