So here’s this Honda CRV in front of me at the stoplight. And
here’s this bumper sticker: “Warren Buffett is My Hero. Capitalist
with a Conscience.” And I figure, while waiting for the light to
change: Small wonder the economic acumen on display at Occupy Wall
Street and like venues is so, shall we say, for politeness’ sake,
undernourished.
The notion of Warren Buffett as folk hero capitalist could
— I say could — proceed from his announcement five years ago of
plans to give away $37.4 billion of his fortune, mostly to the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation. A deeper suspicion lurks,
nonetheless. I mean, five years ago: that was then, this is
now.
What’s the ingenious Buffett currently most famous and
inspirational for? Wanting to raise the tax rates of millionaires
like himself; a desire in tune with current protests noting the
supposed ascendancy over us of “millionaires and billionaires” (to
use President Obama’s phrase).
To single out Buffett for high-mindedness in wanting to
pay more taxes, is to tar, by comparison, those of whatever income
level who suspect or deplore the idea of giving government more
money than it takes in already.
The varied “occupation” armies whose troops assail the
capitalist system have as targets of their wrath a familiar
stereotype. Those of us who more than half a century ago immersed
themselves in “Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories” know the
stereotype well: Scrooge McDuck, Donald’s comically acquisitive
uncle, forever sporting top hat and spats, given to amusing himself
by swimming as it were in a vast storage bin of money. “Unca
Scrooge,” at the end of the tale, usually came up trumps,
consenting to help the downtrodden but only after a little
spluttering about people who apparently think he’s made of
money.
It’s the same myth retailed at the various “occupation”
camps we see and read about daily. We gotta pull down the
capitalists, it seems. It’s just all so unfair they have so much
money. Hardly anyone, to be sure, has as much money the Sage of
Omaha; but, then, he’s a different breed of capitalist, it appears.
Compassion (so the bumper sticker suggests) is his middle name.
Which — to repeat the point — is likely due these days to his
advocacy of inviting the government to tax him more.
“My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a
billionaire-friendly Congress,” Buffett wrote in the New York
Times last Aug. 14, apparently precipitating the hero worship
that takes place at stoplights. The solution: “raise rates
immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million,” with
additional imposts on earners of $10 million or more
annually.
Ample credit is due Warren Buffett for deciding to give
away most of his fortune. Somehow, nonetheless, the current
offering up of millionaires for federal plucking deserves
contextual scrutiny.
A fat cat with a conscience thinks the federal government
needs more money in order that it might… what? Fund more
“shovel-ready” projects? Save teaching jobs? Pay down the national
debt? You don’t get that particular kind of guidance, of course,
from a bumper sticker. What you do get is the sense that the more
money taxpayers give to Washington, the better off we all are.
That’s without respect to the drag that taxation levels may create
on economic growth and private-sector job creation. The benefit of
the doubt always goes to government in these contexts. The
government needs more money because the government needs more money
because… you get the idea pretty quickly.
Actually the wells of compassion are sunk pretty deeply in
the American character, as witness the extraordinary level of
charitable giving. Americans last year donated $291 billion to
charity, an amount 3.8 percent larger than the recession-induced
levels of 2009 and 2008.
As it happens, Warren Buffett isn’t the only wealthy
patrons of charity (notwithstanding his status as the world’s third
richest man). Twenty-five percent of all charitable giving last
year came from the fat cat set. The dollars themselves came from
the earnings of men and women not quite so successful as Buffett
but impelled by the essentially the same motive — that of earning,
compiling, building up.
Buffett in his New York Times article contended
higher tax rates wouldn’t suppress the desire to earn. Possibly
not. What higher rates might produce is strategies and schemes to
undertake investments valuable largely as shields for earnings —
ways not so much of putting good ideas to work as of avoiding
entrapment by the IRS code. The Wall Street occupiers don’t buy
this line. Fat cats, they reason, get that way from raping the
public: for which reason we ought to reduce their
rewards.
Capitalists with Consciences. Hmmm. Want to bet even the
folk hero Warren Buffett fails to see expropriation and
confiscation as evils of the most damaging character?
Buffett the donor: Yes, hooray, good show. Buffett the
advance man for tax increases and renewal of the Big Brother state?
As Uncle Scrooge might well have put it, back in the day: “Quack,
quack!”
