This week you can expect some world-class wealth envy rhetoric from our Dear Ruler.  He will be traveling to Florida (a swing state) this week to push for the passage of the Buffett Rule, a little class warfare ploy that will be taken up in the Senate next week.  The White House press release announcing Obama’s trip to Florida reads a little something like this: “The president believes in standing up for the middle class and making our tax system fairer, where everyone plays by the same set of rules, in order to ensure the economic security of the middle class.”

Too bad, isn’t it, that Obama can’t be traveling to Florida to showcase the successes of his first four years?  Well … that would be because he doesn’t have any.  He’s a miserable failure at pretty much everything he’s done with the exception of fomenting class warfare.  That’s his specialty; but that’s pretty much the specialty of all Marxists., 

So … Dear Ruler wants to make our tax system fairer?   I suppose Obama failed to pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal last week.  If he had, he would have seen that the United States already has the most progressive tax system in the world.  In other words … rich people pay higher share of the total tax burden in the U.S. than in any other major economy in the world.  Oh … and the poor people pay a smaller share of the burden.   

Let’s say that again … though the people who really need to understand this certainly aren’t listening:  The evil, disgusting, slimy, filthy rich in America are paying a higher percentage of the income taxes collected by the U.S. Government than they would be in European socialist countries like France.  The article cites, “The top 10% of earners in the U.S. pay 35% more of the income tax burden than in Sweden and 22% more than in France. These figures—from the 2008 OECD publication "Growing Unequal?"—include all household taxes imposed on income at the federal, state and local level, including social insurance taxes.”

Obama, of course, needs a boogey man to promote this class warfare ploy.  So he comes up with a statistic which says that 1,470 people who made more than $1 million in 2009 paid $0 in federal income tax.  He then uses this figure to proclaim that “The Buffett Rule will make sure that households making $1 million or more will pay at least as much as the middle class.”

In the words of Nancy Pelosi, “Are you serious?”  First of all, what the Obama  administration DOESN’T tell you is that these 1,470 million represent just .7%  --- that’s seven tenths of one percent  --- of the 200,000+ Americans who earn over a million dollars a year.  But as for the other 99.3% of millionaires and billionaires, they are paying 29.1% of their income in federal taxes, compared to households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 that pay about 15% of their income in federal taxes.  As for the lower 50% of earners, they pay an average of 1.85% of their income to income tax.  The truth is that the vast majority of millionaires are paying exponentially more than the middle class in taxes.  But the Obama administration would have you believe that millionaires are not paying as much as the middle class when in fact, those who aren’t represent less than 1% of the millionaires in America. 

That’s Obama propaganda at its finest, “for the purposes of fairness,” of course.