Much Ado About Nothing -- or -- Obama pushes the Buffett Rule

For each of the years president Obama has been in office, the federal deficit has been substantially more than one trillion dollars. That's one trillion dollars per year, not in total. The American economy has sputtered during Obama's term. There are fewer jobs now than there were when Obama took office. The rate of growth of GDP is slower than that experienced by any president since the depths of the depression in the 1930's. Obama tried a massive stimulus bill in 2009 under which the government spent nearly a trillion dollars to increase economic growth; it failed. Obama also tried additional stimulus in the form of the payroll tax cuts in 2011 and 2012. These duts total a quarter of a trillion dollars; they too have not worked. Even today, three and a half years after Obama took office, the economy is still hardly growing at all. So, you may ask, what is Obama's answer to get the economy moving again? What is his new plan? How can the USA shake the economic blues?

Obama's answer is the so-called Buffett Rule. That's right, Obama is going to increase economic growth with a tax increase. That makes about as much sense as fighting murder by killing all potential victims before the murderers make it into the neighborhood. But let's not worry for the moment about the logical efficacy of the Obama solution. No, let's look at its impact as if that impact would be positive.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Buffett Rule, if enacted, would raise an additional 4.7 billion dollars in 2013. The number would be about the same per year for the rest of the decade. This 4.7 billion is less than one-half of one percent of the budget deficit currently experienced by the federal government. If all of the funds from the Buffett rule are spent by the government (a likely conclusion), this will have about one-two hundredth the impact of the Obama stimulus package that did not work. Even compared to the payroll tax holiday, the Buffett rule is tiny. The payroll tax holiday was fifty times bigger, but it also did not work.

It is important to remember why, according to the Democrats, the Stimulus and the Payroll Tax Holiday did not work. Obama and the Obamacrats have told us that these measures were just too small. In order for these to work, say the Obamacrats, they had to be three or four times larger. But Obama, however, is out there pushing the Buffett Rule as his answer to the problem even though it is not larger than the failed Stimulus but less than one-percent the size of the Stimulus.

Obama is basically arguing that to move a boulder that is too big for a man to move, he will use a flea instead.

The truth is that Obama is preaching to the stupid and uninformed. anyone who took the time to understand what Obama is actually saying would know at once that Obama is playing him for a fool. Obama and the Obamacrats should be ashamed.