Screw The Rich (Here’s How)
17th August 2011
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch understands the dialectic.
What I really didn’t understand until recently though is why so many rich Americans seem to loathe their richness as much as everyone else does. Many in Silicon Valley want to tax the rich into the middle class and let government spend and spend and spend. The super rich tech elite flock to Obama, joining in the call to screw the rich as loudly as all the rest.
Whenever something doesn’t make sense, you’re not seeing the whole picture.
Then I figured it out. As I wrote then, the super rich won’t mind at all if we “tax the rich” as it’s currently defined. That’s because people who are super rich don’t really pay taxes. They pay taxes on this year’s income, and capital gains on accumulated wealth. But the only “tax” that can ever touch what they’ve already made is inflation.
All you can do is tax their income this year. That doesn’t touch what’s in the Money Bin.
The super rich love to talk about higher taxes on the rich because it’s a competitive barrier protecting them from competition. If the people making a lot of money today have to pay much higher taxes, they probably won’t ever accumulate enough wealth to be “super rich.”
Yup. There’s the Secret Agenda that the Lower Crust don’t see.
Buffett calls for an increase in all types of taxes – income, dividend and capital gains. That would be a nice triple layer of protection against any newcomers, and still preserve all – 100% – of the $47 billion he’s accumulated until now.
Funny how that works.
Rich people are very good at staying rich. And Warren Buffett is the smartest rich person I know. That’s why he’s able to say feel good bullshit about how he should be paying higher taxes when he has absolutely no intention of letting the government anywhere near his real money.
And that’s the dirty little secret of all these ‘super-rich’ tax-and-spenders; if they feel undertaxed, they could just write a check to the government, but they never will, because what they really object to is the low level of taxation on people who aren’t super-rich yet but are trying to become so … just like them.