Debt and spending promises are unsustainable.
Actor, and Philadelphia native, Will Smith, has now lent his voice to those wanting taxes raised on the wealthier members of society.
“I’m very supportive of that idea,” Smith said in an Associated Press interview. “America has been fantastic to me. I have no problem paying whatever I need to pay to keep my country growing.”
He joins those who favor the Buffet Rule — one among them being President Barack Obama. The president has said anyone making more than $1 million should pay a 30 percent income tax rate. It’s been estimated that 210,000 people would be affected.
But Buffet himself has said the plan with his name falls short, offering only “a small improvement in a very bad tax system,” as reported on Politico.com.
“It doesn’t cure all, it doesn’t cure all revenue problems remotely. In my original article, I said, we’ve got major problems on the expenditure side. But, all it does is it says, when you’ve got 131 of the 400 largest incomes in the country that are averaging 270 million, if you have a third of them paying at rates less than 15 percent counting payroll taxes, that this is something that should be corrected,” Buffet said in an interview.
Does the U.S. have a bad tax system? Absolutely. Thousands of pages of tax code that not even IRS agents can fully understand. A local chiropractor recently needed to make some inquiries to the IRS and the advice given differed from agent to agent.
Yet, a key comment in Mr. Buffet’s remarks is the line about “major problems on the expenditure side.”
The country now has a debt of more than $15 trillion. It was $5 trillion when George Bush became president in January 2001, $10 trillion when he left office. It has jumped another $5 trillion since Mr. Obama assumed office.
Presidents and Congress have done nothing to curtail spending or borrowing and no amount of increased taxes will offset that irresponsibility.
Last year there were a reported 1,210 billionaires in the world with a combined net worth $4.5 trillion. Even if the federal government confiscated all that wealth and applied it to the debt, we’d still owe more than $10 trillion and would still be running an annual deficit.
The debt is unsustainable, and, without restructuring, so are Social Security and Medicare. Taxes alone won’t change that. As billionaire Warren Buffet, who wants to be taxed more, said, there’s a problem on the expenditure side.
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