Time for the Rich to Shut Up on Taxes

[Geee]

American Thinker:

What commonality binds Haim Saban, Penny Pritzker, and Warren Buffett, aside from membership in the billionaire's club? Guilt, and not the quotidian variety -- unfulfilled potential, disappointing behavior, lost love -- that afflicts most of us. Theirs is a guilt that only afflicts the very rich -- a guilt that arises from wanting more equitable outcomes coupled with an unwillingness to pay the requisite taxes to achieve those outcomes. It's the same guilt that has plagued Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Mott progeny for decades.

Messrs. Saban and Buffett and Ms Pritzker are newcomers to the world of self-imposed tax-deficiency guilt, but they have adapted fast. A few years ago, Mr. Buffett excoriated U.S. tax policy, claiming he was taxed at a measly 17.7 percent rate on his 2006 income of $46 million, while his coolie secretary was taxed at a 30 percent rate on her $60,000 annual stipend. (Mr. Buffett included FICA taxes in the calculation, though he shouldn't have; FICA is an insurance program that will directly benefit his secretary, and he excluded the corporate taxes extracted from his dividends and capital gains.)

Mr. Saban and Ms Pritzker also believe the rich should pay more. "Higher taxes for people like me to help others who are less fortunate -- that's okay by me," Mr. Saban was quoted in the now-defunct Portfolio magazine. "Warren said that over the last 20 years, the net worth of the 400 richest Americans has grown seven times and the average American's net earnings are flat. He said that's not right, and that's why he's a Democrat. I agree. It's not good for our democracy," Ms Pritzker was quoted by Bloomberg.

There is a hypocrisy, if not psychosis, at work in the minds of the tax-demanding rich: Mr. Buffett shielded $31 billion of his wealth by transferring it to Bill Gates' philanthropies. The Pritzker family is famous for employing a skein of trusts and offshore accounts to obfuscate their wealth. When the patriarch, Abram Pritzker, died, in 1986, his heirs claimed an estate worth $25,000. The Internal Revenue Service saw it differently, valuing the estate a few dollars north of that figure and sued to collect $53 million in back taxes. The two sides settled for $9.5 million in 1994.