More on Buffett and Taxes

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial and the New York Times has a bunch of letters to the editor, some of which are pretty good. On some level the whole discussion of raising taxes on the super-rich is a distraction from the actual work of reckoning with the debt and deficit problems. The government could confiscate the entire net worth of every billionaire in the country, according to Forbes, and it would have $1.4 trillion, assuming that none of them fled the country with their assets. That's a little less than 10% of our national debt, or a little more than a year's worth of just the deficit spending at the current levels, or less than half of the annual cost of all the government's spending. Even if one wanted to risk the confidence-destroying and incentive-destroying effects of such an assault on private property rights, the payoff wouldn't really be that much. A year later, we'd still have a trillion-dollar deficit and $13 trillion or $14 trillion in debt, but there wouldn't be any billionaires left to argue about raising taxes on.