Obama Goes on Offensive Over Taxes on Wealthy Obama Makes Case for the Buffet Rule

All but certain now that his Republican opponent will be Mitt Romney, President Obama has made his proposed “Buffett Rule” minimum tax for the wealthiest Americans like Mr. Romney a centerpiece of his re-election campaign, defying the political risk of being seen as a tax-and-spender by wary voters.

With a rousing speech on Tuesday to a receptive university audience of about 5,000 in this battleground state, Mr. Obama defined the coming contest as a clash of philosophies: His argument that tax fairness and the common good demand the richest Americans pay at least as much as middle-income taxpayers do, contrasted with Republicans’ opposition to any tax increases as job killers and class warfare, even at the cost of deep cuts in domestic programs.

While voters have not often rewarded candidates who advocate tax increases, Mr. Obama and his campaign advisers, in league with Democrats in Congress, express confidence that voters are on their side, with polls showing that Americans overwhelmingly agree that wealthy taxpayers should pay more and that they favor spending for programs like education, research and health care.

The Democrats’ offensive, not coincidentally, is tied to the likelihood that Mr. Romney will be the nominee. Even as Mr. Obama was speaking at Florida Atlantic University, Mr. Romney’s chief Republican rival, former Senator Rick Santorum, was announcing that he is leaving the race. In past months Mr. Romney’s Republican rivals had caricatured him as a Wall Street investor raking in millions with job-cutting corporate takeovers and slashing his taxes through loopholes and Swiss bank accounts, so he was hardly likely to get off more easily with Democrats.

At bottom, Mr. Obama seeks to talk about the still-weak economy and job creation in a way that plays to Mr. Romney’s weaknesses, and Republicans’ generally, and underplays his own

Please take note how the New York Times increasingly provides an additional descriptive phrase, you might call it an additional title, on its web articles. For example, the official title of this article "Obama Goes on Offensive Over Taxes on Wealthy" appears as the official title the top of the story on its web, print editions. But what it has starting doing quite some time ago is to offer additional information about the web article in the browser tab, in this instance, "Obama Makes Case for the Buffet Rule" which I posted in the title field beneath the official title.

Now when people hear about the "Buffet Rule", the name Obama has given to his new tax proposal, that the wealthiest Americans are to pay a minimum of 30% in federal taxes, most think it's in reference to Warren Buffet and his own proposal to pay a higher federal tax rate.

I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, maybe even cynically so, but I'm not so sure as to the source of Warren Buffet as inspiration for the name given by Obama for his new tax increase.

After checking out definitions for the word "buffet", as posted below, and knowing all too well Obama's hatred for America, his Socialist, Communist design to destroy America in any way possible, it occurred to me that indeed the President chose to call it the "Buffet Rule", the horrible negativity the word connotes, it made perfect sense to call it the 'Buffet Rule' because of the effect Obama hopes it will have on America, Americans, to destroy it in any, every way he possibly can.

NYT:Obama's Buffet Rule Updated: April 10, 2012

The Buffett Rule is the name President Obama has given to his proposal to ensure that the wealthiest Americans pay at least 30 percent of their income in federal taxes.

The proposal derives its name from the longstanding complaint by the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett that his secretary pays a higher federal tax rate than he does. It has become a centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s campaign for re-election.

Republicans have responded by deriding the idea as class warfare, asserting that it would kill jobs or arguing that the problem has been overblown.

In April 2012, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats kicked off a coordinated pressure campaign on Republicans a week before a procedural vote on April 16 that will decide whether the Senate will even debate the Buffett Rule bill. Mr. Obama traveled to Florida on the 10th to deliver a speech on the rule. And his campaign held Buffett Rule events in other swing states that day.

Making a case for the Buffet Rule, Mr. Obama’s economic team, the White House National Economic Council, released a report saying that over the past 50 years the average tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans has dropped much more than the rate for middle-income taxpayers, even as the income of those at the top of the scale has grown significantly more than for everyone else.

The main reason for the disparity in effective tax rates is that wealthy Americans receive much of their income through capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate than earnings from wages or salaries.

The Buffett Rule, if adopted, would only raise $47 billion over 10 years. But the proposal could hold political advantages as well. The president’s Republican challenger in November is expected to be Mitt Romney, who in the Obama campaign’s view is the personification of the argument for a minimum tax on the wealthy.

Mr. Romney, with a big investment portfolio, reported income of about $21 million in each of the last two years and paid about 14 percent of that in federal income taxes. That effective tax rate was far below the tax code’s top rate of 35 percent on the highest incomes because much of the Romney income is from capital gains and dividends, which are taxed at 15 percent, and because he claimed an assortment of tax deductions.

Findings From the Report

According to the White House report, the average federal tax rate of the top earning 0.1 percent of Americans, including income and payroll taxes, has dropped 50 percent over the last half-century, to 26 percent from 51 percent. The 400 richest Americans — all with annual income exceeding $110 million — paid 18 percent in federal income taxes in 2008, the report said; as recently as 1995 their income tax on average was nearly 30 percent, the level of the Buffett Rule.