Free Republic

America's richest man isn't going to make President Obama, the folks in the Occupy Wall Street movement, or their respective supporters in the media happy. Appearing on ABC's This Week Sunday, Bill Gates laughed when asked about the Buffett Rule saying, "You can't raise the taxes we need just by going after that one percent...to really deal with the deficit gap we're talking about, that alone just numerically is not going to be enough" (video follows with transcript): CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: The Buffett Rule, for instance, and all the other proposals the president is...

Technically, nothing prevents Warren Buffett and other “Patriotic Millionaires” from donating money to the federal government right now, but, as they continue to clamor for a higher tax rate for themselves and others, it’s easy to assume they don’t know that. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) have introduced legislation to ensure they do: Dubbed “The Buffett Rule Act of 2011,” the names of the bills take a mocking swipe at President Barack Obama’s own proposed “Buffet Rule,” which conversely would close tax code loopholes to ensure that Warren Buffett and those like him no longer pay...

The White House Press Office announced that President Barack Obama will hold a press conference at 11 a.m. this morning — though no topic was announced. Obama is in the middle of a weeks-long push on his jobs bill, which is certain to take up a significant portion of the questioning. We expect him to be asked about the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the killing of U.S.-citizen Anwar al-Awlaki as well. Also expect Obama to be asked about his criticism of Bank of America's $5 fee for checking account customers and his increasingly-combative tone toward Republicans as his reelection...

Confirming that one has to be a billionaire or at least a multi-millionaire to be an applicant for the Tax Czar position under the Teleprompted Wealth Readjuster, is the latest sheer class warfare idiocy out of tax expert du jour Harry Reid, who has proposed an overhaul of the Obama tax bill with one in which millionaires end up paying a 5% surtax. National Journal reports: "Senate Democrats will replace tax increases proposed by President Obama to pay for his $445 billion jobs bill with a more politically popular tax increase on millionaires, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said...

With the federal budget deficit cruising along at some $1.5 trillion a year – a gargantuan number – a consensus has gathered across the country that something serious has got to be done about it. Something appropriate to the magnitude of the problem. And yet what does the president propose in the thick of the discontent? The “Buffett Rule,” whereby the highest income-earners don’t pay an average tax rate that’s lower than that of their middle-class peers. Estimated revenue enhancement, even by the president’s own advisors: peanuts. It’s not about receipts, it’s about fairness. And what’s “income” again? That portion...

Barack Obama last week put forward a package of tax increases to pay for a proposed $447bn jobs programme. The most controversial proposal is that no one making more than $1m a year should pay a smaller share of his income in taxes than a middle class family pays. This is popularly called the Buffett Rule, after the billionaire Warren Buffett, who has long complained that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, and famously came out in public recently asking to pay more.Republicans were quick to denounce the proposal as “class warfare”, and to argue that low...

NOTE: Jackson is the CEO of CapLinked, an online platform for private investing. He previously ran the marketing team at PayPal, and is the author of the award-winning book The PayPal Wars. President Obama announced a new tax proposal that sets a minimum tax rate for households with annual income above $1 million on Sept. 19. The proposal is called the “Buffett Rule” for billionaire investor Warren Buffet, who in an editorial in August bemoaned that he pays a lower federal tax rate than his middle-class employees. While time will tell if this new tax proposal makes for good politics,...

This week, President Obama announced a new way for the government to make more money: put a floor on the tax rates that millionaires face. He coined the idea the "Buffett Rule,"... [Snip] So how much would the so-called Buffett Rule bring in? It's hard to say, because Obama didn't define precisely how it would work. But he did say it would create a tax rate floor for those who make more than $1 million per year. So let's use 2009 tax return data from the IRS to imagine some possible scenarios for how much additional tax revenue the new...

During Monday morning’s address from the White House, President Obama drove home his demands that millionaires and billionaires need to start paying higher tax rates that America’s middle class. The only catch here is that they already do. And although the so-called “Buffet Rule” from Obama looks towards correcting this gaff, it seems as if the president offered up a goof of his own. According to private and governmental data made available to the Associated Press, the wealthiest Americans pay much more in taxes than the middle class and poor, and on average pay at a higher rate and contribute...

WASHINGTON -- Billionaire investor Warren Buffett isn’t as undertaxed as he and President Obama seem to think. *** Buffett actually was taxed twice on his investment income. First, Buffett had to make the money he invested. Those earnings were taxed as corporate income, at about a 35-percent rate. Then, Uncle Sam took another cut when Buffett invested the money and earned a profit. That’s when Buffett paid the 15 percent capital-gains tax rate. All told, after combining corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, Buffett forked over about 45 percent of his earnings.

Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of The Home Depot    (NYSE: HD) and one of Atlanta's wealthiest businessmen, says President Barack Obama’s plan to increase taxes on the rich would only serve to slow hiring and slow America's economic recovery, reports Atlanta Business Chronicle    broadcast partner WXIA-TV. He also sharply criticized billionaire Warren Buffet’s support of the plan. President Obama on Monday introduced a plan combining trillion-dollar spending cuts and the closure of tax law loopholes for the rich. "For us to solve this problem everybody including the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations have to pay their fair share" Obama...