Saturday, December 04, 2010

The Guilt Tripped Rich

I'm sure everyone's heard about billionaire Warren Buffet saying that he and other megarich folks need to and should pay more in taxes. This has been on tv as if it were some sort of sacred pronouncement, but I'm not impressed.

If Warren Buffet wants to give more money to the government he's free to send the IRS as much of his income as he wants. Other the-rich-should-pay-more-taxes billionaries like Bill Gates can do the same. So, why don't they? Simple. THEY LIKE BEING RICH. If they didn't Buffet, Gates, and friends would give away all their money, but they won't. They love their wealth but they apparently feel tremendous guilt over it. So they anounce their support for higher taxes on the rich to try and assuage their guilt and look good to the public in the process. It's almost like their saying, "Hey middle America! We're the good rich. We know how bad we are for being successful and we want to pay for it by having the government take more of our money. So please, don't hate us!" Pathetic.

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates don't seem to understand that if they want to assuage their guilt they should do more good for the less fortunate themselves. Certainly helping the needy personally would be more satisfying and meaningful to them than empowering impersonal state bureaucracies to do so. Buffet, Gates, and other super rich people most likely do have charities that they generously support. But they seem to think such private efforts don't qualify as guilt-assuaging good works. Only governmental confiscation of their excess income can redeem them.

Wealthy Americans who turn against their own success are akin to traitors. Their prosperity, which often had humble beginnings, highlights the promise of capitalism and the American way. Instead of extolling that reality they've opted for the counter message that success is a sin for which you must do penance, preferrably in the form of having the state take your money. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I'm not impressed.

Here's my advice to Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and all other guilt racked billionaires. If you feel that bad about being rich then get a good therapist or just give all your money away. But please stop calling the government down on yourselves while you're enjoying your wealth. That just makes you look like hypocrites and frauds. And that's something for you to really feel guilty about.

3 comments:

Skunkfeathers said...

I find it interesting that the rich elite say the rich should pay more, but (a) really mean only the other rich, and not the 'elite' ones and (b) if they wanna put their money where their mouth is, treble their own payments.

Of course, you won't see that. Libtard elitespeak is hypocrisy at it's apogee.

Anonymous said...

I totally agree with your assessment of this. The rich already pay the lions' share of the taxes.....so I am not sure why they feel the need to pay more, except that the media and the left in this country have worked actively to make them feel that way.

My idea on this is this. If they want to pay more they can...but they don't have too.

JMK said...

Warren Buffet, like most of the truly rich (those who DON'T rely on income as their primary source of wealt) aren't impacted by the income tax. In fact, the income tax was designed to leave the wealth of the truly rich untouched, while making it harder for otrhers to acrue any meaningful wealth.

Buffet and other wealthy investors have their investments taxed (and rightly so) at a relatively low, fixed (Capital Gains) rate.

The source of wealth for such peopele is NOT income but the exponential valuation of stock assets.

A person who bought $10,000 worth of Microsft stock in 1989 (for instance) would have seen it rise to over $14MILLION today!

How?

Because MS shares have split numerous times since then, 1,000 shares became 2,000 then 6,000 then 12,000, then 36,000 and so on....that's the leveraged power of exponential stock valuations, when one is able to buy into a successful corporation early on.

People who earn their money via investments aren't impacted much at al by the income tax.

The progressive income tax is designed to "even out" or level the earnings of workers, be they engineers, plumbers, truckers, or ditch-diggers.....the income tax is set to limit, or blunt the disparity in the valuation of skills within the labor market.