'Buffett tax' would raise just $31B over 11 years

[coyotes_geek]

WASHINGTON – A bill designed to enact President Barack Obama's plan for a "Buffett rule" tax on people earning more than $1 million a year would rake in just $31 billion over the next 11 years, according to an estimate by Congress' official tax analysts obtained by The Associated Press.

That would be a drop in the bucket of the more than $7 trillion in federal budget deficits projected during that period.


In an analysis provided to The AP on Tuesday, Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that a bill introduced last month by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., to enact Obama's proposal into law would collect $31 billion over 11 years.

Obama has proposed requiring that people earning $1 million or more annually pay at least 30% of their income in taxes.

link (http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/story/2012-03-20/buffett-millionaire-tax-proposal/53669452/1)

Republicans are idiots for opposing this. Democrats are idiots for thinking that raising taxes on millionaires accomplishes anything more than being a symbolic gesture.

[boutons_deux]

Ryan's repeal of AMT would hand the 1% over $1T, in addition to the $1T dubya handed the 1% with his estate tax cuts.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Its the capital gains that makes the difference most rich people don't get paid a wage like that to generate wealth.

[CosmicCowboy]

link (http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/story/2012-03-20/buffett-millionaire-tax-proposal/53669452/1)

Republicans are idiots for opposing this. Democrats are idiots for thinking that raising taxes on millionaires accomplishes anything more than being a symbolic gesture.

agreed

[Th'Pusher]

Its the capital gains that makes the difference most rich people don't get paid a wage like that to generate wealth.

I thought the buffet rule as proposed by Obama was supposed to treat income over a million dollars the same whether it was earned or unearned. Isn't that the whole point? That buffet gets taxed at a 15% rate because the majority of his income is taxed as cap gains? Or is this just fixing the carried interest loophole and taxing earned income over 1M at minimum of 30%. If that's the case, well yeah, it's not going to raise shit for revenue. Tax cap gains at the same rate as earned income and that number goes up significantly I'd bet.

[DMC]

We don't have enough of those types to make a significant difference. It's a feel good measure for the "we are on your side, poor people" politicians.

[boutons_deux]

Repugs arguing against any and all tax increases, in their strategy of drowning govt (and last vestiges of countervailing power against corporate predations) in a bathtub.

Conservatives Falsely Claim The Buffett Rule Would Only Raise A ‘Meager’ Amount Of Revenue

Naturally, congressional Republicans are opposed. Earlier this week, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) gleefully trotted out a revenue estimate from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and claimed it showed that Whitehouse’s bill, S. 2059, would generate a “meager” $47 billion in revenue over ten years.

But as Senator Hatch surely knows, official estimates like JCT’s are done against a “current law” baseline that assumes that Congress will let all of the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule. If that actually happened, many fewer millionaires would be paying super low rates. In other words, the $47 billion from the Buffett rule would be on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that would result from getting rid of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which are a major reason we need the Buffett Rule in the first place. (Even with the same baseline, another estimate shows S. 2059 raising $171 billion in revenue, much more than the JCT score.)

Of course, Hatch and his Republican colleagues have fought successfully to protect the high-end Bush tax cuts. Against a “current policy” baseline that assumes that Republicans continue to block the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, Whitehouse’s bill has been estimated to raise $264 billion — more than five times as much. That is not a “meager” amount of revenue. In fact, it’s twice the amount needed to restore all of the cuts to federal nutrition assistance in the House Republican budget unveiled this week.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/03/22/450000/conservatives-buffett-meager-revenue/