MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“The Jimmy Buffet Rule”, Ellis Henican, Fox News Opinion, September19, 2011
Forget Warren Buffett. The coddle-the-rich crowd has now discovered “The Jimmy Buffett Rule.”
You know how that works, right? For the folks who own really big sailboats and shelter their wealth on islands with 
swaying palm trees, it’s always margarita time! Go ahead and squeeze the middle class some more!
Speaking from the Rose Garden on Monday, President Obama offered a more populist approach to cutting $3 trillion from the federal debt. His plan includes whacks in war funding and various programs Democrats are usually loathe to trim. It also advances what at any other time would be considered in a perfectly modest suggestion: That people at the very top should kick in too. The president would do this by letting the Bush tax cuts expire for upper-earners and by adding a special new tax on people who earn $1 million-plus a year.
My gosh, with all the shouts of “class warfare,” you’d have thought he’d asked hedge-fund executives to pay the same tax rates as receptionists and security guards. The uproar from some of the president’s critics was just that loud.
Here’s an important addendum to the Jimmy Buffett Rule: If you ask the bottom 98 to sacrifice, that’s a prudent fiscal policy. If you ask the top 2 percent to sacrifice, that’s class warfare.
And one other thing to remember: The rich-mustn’t-pay argument goes down a whole lot easier if you have the right phrases for the small, privileged group you are trying to protect. Don’t call t
hem “fat cats.” Never use terms like “the super-rich” or “millionaires and billionaires.” Avoid all of that. They are “job creators,” “small business owners” and “people with the entrepreneurial spirit to get us out of this mess.”
Who’d want to raise taxes on someone like that?
The truth is that lately, things have been very sweet for those at the very top. The middle class keeps shrinking. More working families are tumbling into poverty, the second-highest poverty rate in 45 years. A greater and greater percentage of the wealth in America is held in fewer and fewer hands.
Yet over the past few years, those who could most afford to help have been largely insulated from any pain. You’ve seen the statistics: These days, the top 1 percent of Americans earn a higher percent of the nation’s income
than at any time since 1928. Lately, the income of the top 1 percent of household has been growing 10 times faster than the bottom 90 percent.
The middle class was always the strength of America. That’s what gave the country its energy, its creativity, its drive. But for middle-class Americans, a solid career with benefits is becoming more the exception than the rule. Kids are coming out of college today with huge student loans and shrunken opportunities. Fifty million Americans can’t afford health insurance. For young people especially, home ownership is an increasingly distant dream.
There’s lots of head-shaking right now over the economic mess in Europe — and rightfully so. But there’s another specter worth considering and it doesn’t come from across the ocean. It comes from the South.
I don’t mean to get all class-warfare on you…But unless we find a way to spread the burden upward and cut the middle class some slack, it isn’t Greece or Portugal we will soon be resembling. It’s those old Caribbean islands Jimmy likes to sing about. Where a few super-rich families own just about everything. Where the vast majority of others have hardly anything at all.
E-mail ellis@henican.com.
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We are over unless we get our heads out of our asses as a country and reinvent ourselves. Congress must be overturned, overhauled and limit their terms. If we continue to live in the corners, we will lose. Look at a history book. Empires have a life span. It’s not too late if we WAKE THE F- – – – UP! Government is us, we pay for ourselves through taxes, we are systematically destroying the very middle class that we believe defines us as a country. Sign me fed up, forlorn, and yet just a little hopeful that people will rise up against this injustice. Let these individuals and corporations begin to pay their fair share and take this country back!
The rich are indeed creating jobs, but they are located in China:
http://www.wbjournal.com/news49855.html, and http://www.epi.org/publication/growing-trade-deficit-china-cost-2-8-million/.
It is not nice to make fall guys out of people that hire others and and are the accurate stimulus for the economy.
Well, if they were actually hiring, we wouldn’t be in this mess. The whole point is, they’ve got more money than they’ve had since 1928 but they’re just sitting on it. They’re NOT hiring.
Kate’s got a good idea. Proving it and to keep doing it is the problem.
The government creates many jobs, so does the private sector. However, the private sector has sat on profits, instead of reinvesting and creating jobs over the last decade. Can’t tax our way out of a recession? Pretty sure the 50’s-60’s saw some of the higher tax rates in the last century, and the economy was booming.
Our debt problems started with Bush Jr and his tax cuts(I’d even add wars, but those were “off the books” until Obama in 2010).
The few million regular guys who support it are what are known as “Useful Idiots”.
If you haven’t heard the term(and no, I’m not just calling you an idiot), you should look it up. You might have to go outside Fox News for this one…
I think the so-called “job creators” should be given a tax break only after they have been proven to actually create jobs, within their own borders. Creating jobs overseas shouldn’t count, and neither should leeching off the middle class. It’s the middle class who are doing the hardest work; why should they pay the highest taxes. Jay Adler is right, but not for the reason he thinks he is. It’s the middle class that pulls itself up by its proverbial bootstraps, and it’s they that deserve tax breaks. The current system is what prevents them bettering their quality of life and it’s the same system that allows the fat-cat “job creators” to rest on their laurels while they ship their jobs to places that won’t track their human rights abuses and where they’re not required to give breaks or pay a minimum wage. They’re the ones ruining the economy, not the folks scraping to get by. You try pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, Jay Adler, if you can’t get better work than $10 per hour and have to choose between paying rent and keeping the lights on. You’re privileged, and it shows.
@JWB. “The Government does NOT create jobs..”
So what about the Department of Defense? Over 3 million employeed, the largest employeer on the planet. What do you call that? You might wanna check your facts before speaking.
Eat the Rich? You people insane? The rich have eaten US…the lot of us…and have an insatiable appetite. You idiots call asking for a few % points more in taxes, to pay taxes on earned income as it is irregardless as EATING THE RICH? What a load of self righteous garbage.
While I understand the knee jerk reaction of “I worked hard to get were I am…”, how is it fair that those with lower income should pay a higher % of their income. I don’t buy this Job creation crap. Just because you are making more money than most does not mean you are creating jobs. No matter what you think about the poorest segment of our population the vast majority are hard working families that don’t deserve to carry the bulk of the tax burden.
My comment does not indicate where I stand on the Warren Buffet on down scale. Because I spoke up against a society that attempts to drain those that applied themselves and give those who really need a paycheck a chance, am I a Bill Gates prototype?. When you read my comment, did you think I was opposed to Obama’s plan because it would effect me? I wish. One of my young adult kids makes more money than I ever made. I spent most of my career as a door to door salesman.Sure we live in a top area only because we inherited our house free of debt from my father law. It is true that I am a street wise exceptionally shrewd investor over the lap top, others can too. Here’s the point, not only rich people think this tax plan will not work, but there are a few million regular guys like me that have no use for it.
So let’s eat the rich, right? The issue that you and others on your side of the “taxes are good” seem to forget is that the Federal Government is much like a drug addict. Give ’em more money and they’ll spend all of that and even more money. It never ends. Tax the rich all you want and nothing will change. Obama and the clowns in Washington DC are talking about cuts over 10 years. Sure, whatever. Let me predict to you now that in 10 years those “cuts” will have happened or they will have some reason that they are trying but just can’t seem to find the cuts.
The Government does NOT create jobs. Never has. Never will. The private sector creates jobs and pay taxes to the government so that the government can defend our shores (very poorly as seen by our pourous borders, deliver the mail (postal system…going broke as I write this), and take care of various entitlements (which are out of control). Have you ever looked at the waste and fraud in welfare systems today in this nation? There is no incentive for those on welfare to get off the system because politicians want them to stay poor so they can keep them scared and ensure they’ll vote to keep their welfare system in tact. It’s pathetic and to believe more taxes will solve our economic woes is native and absurd. We are not going to tax our way into economic prosperity.
This government simply has to become smaller and more efficient. I am sorry for you that you actually believe that politicians in Washington DC have any idea what they are doing today. They don’t have answers to economic problems. In fact, they are part of the problem.
How did we get into a mess where we have to tax people in a recession?Now people who did the right thing in life,that is went to higher learning or acquired a trade have to fund our society when all in all it was the failed programs that caused this problem.It is not nice to make fall guys out of people that hire others and and are the accurate stimulus for the economy. This whole thing is nothing more than to prey on the hoy poly and drag out their jealousy and enviousness. I remember a long time ago they said pull yourself up by your own boot straps.Now,
today Robin Hood is the Spinx, remember, he robs from the rich to give to the poor.