For Obama, Fairness Is Class Warfare By Another Name

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Here we go again.

At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama argued that the country's spiraling debt was largely the result of exploding health care costs.

That was true. He then said the cure for these exploding costs would be his health care reform.

That was not true. It was obvious at the time that it could never be true.

If government gives health insurance to 33 million uninsured, that costs. Costs a lot. There's no free lunch. Now we know.

The Congressional Budget Office's latest estimate is that ObamaCare will add $1.76 trillion in federal expenditures through 2022.

And, as one of the Medicare trustees has just made clear, if you don't double count the $575 billion set aside for the Medicare trust fund, ObamaCare adds to the already crushing national debt.

Three years later, we are back to smoke and mirrors. This time it's not health care but the Buffett Rule, which would impose a minimum 30% effective tax rate on millionaires.

Here is how Obama introduced it last September: "Warren Buffett's secretary shouldn't pay a (higher) tax rate than Warren Buffett. . .. And that basic principle of fairness, if applied to our tax code, could raise enough money" to "stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade. ... This is not politics; this is math."

OK. Let's do the math. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this new tax would yield between $4 billion and $5 billion a year.

If we collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years — a span longer than the life of this republic — it would not cover the Obama deficit for 2011 alone.