Mr. Obama and the 'BLUFF-it Rule!'

Hey, why not BLUFF your way through a presidency and then use the same technique to try to get elected again? It seems to have worked for Barack Obama…so far.

So what is the deal with the so-called "Buffett Rule," which I will refer to for the remainder of this post as the "BLUFF-it Rule?" Some might conjure up idyllic days on the beach with an uninterrupted stream of frozen margaritas while Jimmy Buffett performs “Margaritaville” endlessly in the background, but, no, that’s not it at all, though that might be preferable for most. No, let’s talk about Warren Buffett.

Warren Buffett is Barack Obama’s special friend. Buffett is the primary shareholder, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The A-stock version of Berkshire Hathaway can be found on the New York Stock Exchange listed as BRK.A and closed on Friday, April 14, at $118,385.00 per share. Right, that’s per share, not the total sum value of the company.

Now, a few things are pertinent to the conversation. Mr. Buffett is consistently ranked among the world’s wealthiest people and in 2008 was ranked as THE wealthiest, dropping to third in 2011.

So, Mr. Buffett has gone on record stating that he thinks that he, along with all the other millionaires and billionaires in the country, should pay more taxes. If he wasn’t already a close friend of Mr. Obama, which, BTW, he was, this surely would have endeared him to the president forever. You see, this kind of talk helps carry on the class warfare that works so well for Mr. Obama. Here’s the thing, if Mr. Buffett was really that concerned about his tax burden there are a number of things he could do:

• Fire the array of tax accountants and tax lawyers that prepare his federal and state income tax forms and stop taking advantage of all the loopholes to lower his taxable income.
• Write a check to the IRS. In case he doesn’t know how that’s done, there’s a protocol in place and an address to do just that by writing a check to “Bureau of the Public Debt” and then address it to:

Bureau of the Public Debt

Department G

P.O. Box 2188

Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188

• Pay up the several million dollars of taxes that Berkshire Hathaway owes in arrears to the IRS.

Yes, you read that right; one of the world’s richest men, at the helm of the eighth largest public company in the world, has steered that ship into the waters of tax evasion and is in arrears for multiple years of corporate income taxes. This, then, is how the billionaire, who says that he is not satisfied that he and others like him are paying enough taxes, runs his company.

Mr. Buffett, worry about paying the taxes you owe before you tell us that you don’t think you’re paying enough. You are losing credibility with such nonsense.

So, in honor of his good friend, billionaire and corporate tax evader, Warren Buffett, Mr. Obama uses Mr. Buffett as a ploy to demonize people who make over $1 million a year.

Wait, it gets better: Mr. Buffett and Mr. Obama engaged in a scam to make earning a million dollars even more egregious by having Mr. Buffett state that his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did. If fact, it appears now that the combined income of his secretary and her husband put them in the highest tax bracket thus placing them in the class of the evil rich, so why worry, Mr. Buffett? Indeed, now we find out that Mr. Obama’s secretary probably paid at a higher rate than Mr. Obama himself, as well, thus the need for a BLUFF.

So, what we end up with is the “millionaire tax,” or, more properly, the “BLUFF-it Rule.”

Again, as I’ve written before, the answer to our problems is not to keep trying to bleed more tax money out of the wealthy (as if earning a million dollars really put you in the Buffett camp), but to simplify the tax code. What good does it do to raise the tax on people, some of whom, pay nothing at all already due to loopholes in the present tax code? Loopholes, in fact, that are not readily available to you and I. BTW, are you aware that the present tax code is over 75,000 pages? Can anyone maintain a straight face and say it doesn’t need to be simplified?

Consider that GE earned $15 billion of profit, $5 billion of which was earned here in the U.S., last year and paid no corporate income taxes due to tax loopholes. You might wonder, as well, how serious Mr. Obama is when he selects the CEO of GE as his jobs czar. GE has been accused as being more than willing to ship jobs overseas to make a profit.

I’ve asked this before and I’ll try it one more time. For argument’s sake, let’s imagine that you, the reader, were part of the almost 47 percent of wage earners who paid no federal income tax. Let’s continue the ruse and imagine I was a successful small business owner who had $500,000 of taxable income thus finding myself in the 35 percent tax bracket. How much more would I have to pay before you think it would be fair?

Remember this though: You don’t have to make $1 million to end up in the highest tax bracket. A married couple with no children finds themselves in the 35 percent tax bracket with taxable income of only $193,000. You could sell your home and end up there very easily.

So, do we really need to continue the ruse of “tax the wealthy” with the "BLUFF-it Rule," or can we finally admit that, even though all of the lawyers in Congress have a vested interest in keeping the tax code as it is, it is finally time to make a change?

Finally, just how stupid does Mr. Obama think the American people are?