Rich Lowry wrote a great commentary on Democrats who themselves become filthy rich using the same tax code that Mitt Romney uses, even while they demonize those that do. It is a laugh. I mean are we to believe that Barack Obama with all his book royalties, isn’t filthy rich? And that his tax accountants aren’t right now exploiting the same Congressionally-crafted tax loopholes as any other wealthy American would?

For that matter, I recall in 2004 two of the most brazen and wealthy Americans — John Edwards and John “Heinz Ketchup” Kerry — running on the Democrat ticket. Where was the outrage then?

Here’s Lowry:

Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to the Obama reelection campaign, wrote a scathing memo the other day about Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital, subtitled “Profit at Any Cost.”

Cutter sounded like a sworn enemy of private equity. Except a few years ago, she was a spokeswoman for J.C. Flowers, a private-equity firm. Why do work for J.C. Flowers when there are so many other worthy ventures needing communications help that don’t make insane amounts of money and pay incredibly well?

Presumably Cutter wanted to be as well compensated as possible, by J.C. Flowers and the “several Fortune 500 companies” her communications firm served, according to her bio. This is utterly unremarkable but for the fact that she is part of an Obama team that argues there is something inherently wrong with income inequality. In his signature Osawatomie, Kan., speech, President Barack Obama asserted that rising inequality hampers those at the bottom. If that’s so, shouldn’t the people around him endeavor to keep from adding to the injustice by making too much money?

But none of them goes out and gets poor. Very few of them, it seems, even go out and get middle-class. They get rich. Many of them climb right into the 1 percent. Obama economic adviser Alan Krueger gave a speech recently lamenting the shrinking middle class, without mentioning that the reason for its diminishment is that so many people have risen all the way out of the middle. By Krueger’s (perverse) standard, major Obama officials have heedlessly contributed to the destruction of the American middle class by earning too much.

Consider only the chiefs of staff. President Obama’s new chief of staff, Jacob Lew, made $1.1 million in one year working for Citigroup. His prior chief of staff, William Daley, made $8.7 million in roughly one year working for JPMorgan Chase. His original chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, made $16 million working for an investment firm. Judging by this record, President Obama only feels comfortable entrusting his affairs to men who have earned outrageous paydays.

The Obama 1 percenters abound. President Obama’s first national economic director, Larry Summers, earned $600,000 as president of Harvard, then went to a hedge fund where he made $5 million in one year, before joining the administration. His first budget director, Peter Orszag, left to make $2 million to $3 million a year at Citigroup. His current national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, got $7 million from his work at Fannie Mae from 2000 to 2003.

Certainly Obama’s top aides don’t have to make millions in finance, but they’d almost have to go out of their way not to get rich. In the aggregate, they are smart, highly educated, and hard-working. They tend to marry people with the same characteristics. They have relatively stable families. They have success — indeed, the 1 percent — written all over them. They probably would be scandalized to work at a private-sector job paying “only” $50,000, the median household income in the U.S.

In a report that has the tone of a revelation about it, the New York Times discovered that the 1 percent is a “varied group, one that includes podiatrists and actuaries, executives and entrepreneurs, the self-made and the silver spoon set.” By one estimate, the 1 percent starts at households making $380,000 a year. That means in 2005, Michelle Obama alone was almost making enough to hoist the Obama household into the dreaded 1 percent with her $316,962 job at the University of Chicago Hospital.

Is it too much to ask that one high-profile Obama official leave government and refuse to make more than $70,000 a year out of solidarity with the middle class and commitment to income equality? Of course it is. Just as the definition of a recession is when someone else loses a job, greed is when someone else makes a lot of money. For anyone hoping to get to the top, the collective message of current and former Obama officials should be clear: Do as they do, not as they say.

Here’s a great commentary by Jonah Goldberg (from his G-file e-letter) on the OWS movement:

As I mentioned in the Corner, I love this story about the fraying tensions among the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Aside from the general schadenfreudtasticness of it all, I found this bit to contain some fascinating contradictions. Apparently some of the “facilitators” — you might call them the avant-garde of the avant-garde of the avant-garde of the lumpenproletariat — have started censoring and taxing the drummers.

To Shane Engelerdt, a 19-year-old from Jersey City and self-described former “head drummer,” this amounted to a Jacobinic betrayal. “They are becoming the government we’re trying to protest,” he said. “They didn’t even give the drummers a say. . . . Drumming is the heartbeat of this movement. Look around: This is dead, you need a pulse to keep something alive.”

The drummers claim that the finance working group even levied a percussion tax of sorts, taking up to half of the $150-300 a day that the drum circle was receiving in tips. “Now they have over $500,000 from all sorts of places,” said Engelerdt. “We’re like, what’s going on here? They’re like the banks we’re protesting.”

Wait a second. The leadership of OWS is imposing a 50 percent tax rate on the most successful and entrepreneurial protesters and they’re regulating their ability to satisfy the consumer (as it were)?

This Engelerdt guy’s grasp of political theory is a bit off, though. First he says that the organizers are becoming the sort of government they’re protesting. Except that has it exactly wrong. They’re becoming the sort of government they’re demanding!

He then goes on to say that the decision to confiscate so much of the drummers’ obscene profits makes the organizers like the banks. But the banks don’t tax anybody — that’s government’s job. In fact, if these guys had their way, the drummers should be taxed at a much higher rate, right? Why should the drummers make so much more than the guy running the seminar on how to make hemp-twine condoms or the lady teaching folks how to recycle everything from urine to toilet paper?

Beyond the Occupy Wall Street crowd playing the part of the “useful idiots” of organized socialist, national socialist (i.e., Nazi)  and communist parties, you’ve got a massive number of economically-ignorant, naive or at minimum mis-educated youths who seem unaware that they’re protesting the wrong street: Instead of occupying Wall Street they should be occupying K-street, or better yet, the Independence, First, and Constitution streets that surround the Capital building.

[Bloomberg] Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show.

The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046.

The figures demonstrate how the nation’s political and financial classes are prospering as the economy struggles with unemployment above 9 percent and thousands of Americans protest in the streets against income disparity, said Kevin Zeese, director of Prosperity Agenda, a Baltimore-based advocacy group trying to narrow the divide between rich and poor.

“There’s a gap that’s isolating Washington from the reality of the rest of the country,” Zeese said. “They just get more and more out of touch.”

Total compensation for federal workers, including health care and other benefits, last year averaged $126,369, compared with $122,697 in 2009, according to Bloomberg News calculations of Commerce Department data. There were 170,467 federal employees in the District of Columbia as of June.

That’s right. People working for the federal government make more money than those who actually produce things, be they in Silicon Valley, New York City, Atlanta or B.F. Idaho. And why is that? Well as Tina Korbe points out the Beltway “boasts one lawyer for every 12 city residents” — that’s a lot of “fat cats” to grease the palms of your slimy senator or representative in turn for tax dollars and fabricated “shovel ready” phantom jobs required to sort through phone-book sized regulatory bills.

The Bloomberg report continues:

Lobbyists play a prominent role in the Washington economy. In 2010 there were 12,964 registered lobbyists, with most working in or around the nation’s capital, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington- based research group that tracks political spending. Spending on lobbying efforts reached a record $3.51 billion last year, up from $3.49 billion in 2009.

Ironically, while President Barack Obama and Democrats have been expressing solidarity with this confused lot of Marxists, they’re well entrenched in the Lobby enterprise.

This week the Washington Post reported that “President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data. … Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.”

The Democrats are against lobbying and big banking… except when they’re for it.

Paraphrasing President Obama, one job of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is to determine if a business is making ‘too much profit.’ Mr. Obama is correct in his assessment that nobody is entitled to “a certain amount of profit,” but where he runs frighteningly amok is taking that assessment to mean that government should be the decider, rather than the American consumer.

Mr. Obama’s statement is quite telling, and scary too: Recall the former Soviet Union leaders used to brag that they suffered no bankruptcies in the USSR — the reason being that one can never have a bankruptcy if there is no private property, or private ownership of business. The president told us in 2008 that his wish was to “fundamentally transform America.” Judging by his words below, he wasn’t kidding. And he wonders why so many Americans fear him, and think he’s a socialist or communist?

President Obama joined fellow Democrats in blasting a new fee on debit card users announced by Bank of America, arguing that banks do not have an “inherent right” to a certain amount of profits.

The bank has come under a hail of criticism after it announced it would begin charging debit card users $5 a month, blaming the move on policymakers who curbed the amount of fees they could collect from retailers.

“You don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated,” he said in an interview with ABC News. “My hope is that you’re going to see a bunch of the banks saying to themselves, ‘You know what, this is not good business practices.’”

“This is exactly why we need this [CFPB - Treasury Deparment's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau],” the president said. “We need somebody whose sole job it is to prevent stuff like this.”

Prevent stuff like what? Making a profit? Wouldn’t merchants (the banks’ customers) best determine if they’re being gouged or not rather than an unelected and unaccountable group of bureaucrats in the U.S. Treasury department? Wouldn’t consumers best decide, rather than some government bureau, if they would prefer credit cards or prepaid cards?

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out recently, here’s how government grows: It (1) either creates a real problem or invents a mythical one, then (2) proposes and enacts a “solution” to that problem. (3) Repeat steps 1 & 2.

So in this case the Democrat Congress, under the Durbin Amendment, invented the problem — that the economy was harmed by debit card fees that were too high for merchants — then enacted the solution, the Durbin Amendment, which by government fiat cut in half banks’ debit profitability, telling them that they could only charge 24 cents per debit transaction (from 44 cents).

This “solution” to an imaginary “problem” was typical liberally-activist government arrogance stemming from a belief that its “experts” could devise better economic engineering than that of 300 million consumers acting collectively.

It also smacks of hypocrisy in the form of propping up one kind of crony corporatism (bowing to the retail lobby) even as they demonize another (banking).

Here’s how the Democrat’s “solution” will affect you: less consumer choices — not just Bank of America, but the rest, like Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, Regions, and Morgan Chase, for starters, are now eliminating free checking and charging annual fees for debit-card holders, as well as eliminating many points programs.

According to CNN, “Your debit card may soon be denied for purchases greater than $100 — or even as little as $50.”

Hey, but thank heavens the government is “protecting us.”

Even worse, Mr. Obama must hate poor people. Without free checking, many poor Americans will be forced into costly high-percentage paycheck-cashers and money lenders. (Hello Amscot!)

Worst of all, the Durbin Amendment is a jobs killer: According to Portfolio.com, “the majority of startups and entrepreneurs often use their personal accounts as the initial run of funding. They count on the perks they can collect as ways to reward their staffs, especially when they can’t always afford the high-flying salaries of the past.”

Sorry, small business!

This is especially true for the smaller banks and credit unions that cannot absorb the financial loss:

The most noticeable change will likely be the closure of bank branches, reversing a decade-long growth. Branches today serve as customer-recruitment centers, as customers, once enrolled, do much of their banking electronically, by ATM or online. By making many new customers unprofitable, however, the Durbin amendment eliminates the incentive to compete by offering more branches.

Citing the negative impact of the Durbin amendment and other regulations on customer profitability, Texas-based IBC bank recently announced its decision to close 55 supermarket-based branches, eliminating 500 jobs, rather than increasing banking fees. Other banks will inevitably follow suit.

Conceived of as a narrow special-interest giveaway to large retailers, the Durbin amendment will have long-term consequences for the consumer banking system. Wealthier consumers will be able to avoid the pinch of higher banking fees by increasing their use of credit cards. Many low-income consumers will not. Banking will become less innovative and consumer-friendly.

No word yet from President Obama if large chain retailers will next be investigated by the CFPB for earning “a certain amount of profit.”

Free speech for me, but not for thee? That seems to be the message in New Orleans. The video is courtesy of the Media Research Center.

And I do love the part where city councilwoman Susan Guidry orders the police to take down the signs (on private property, no less) citing “public safety.” She admits she doesn’t even yet herself know what law the man is breaking by putting up the signs (did I mention on his private property?) and goes on to rattle off a few “maybes” as the cops take them down. “Maybe it’s the size of the signs…” Or, maybe Ms. Guidry is only for free speech that’s not critical of her ideological leanings? And while we’re at it, maybe we should also remove ATMs in the name of public safety too, since that’s were people are commonly mugged. That’s the message she seems to be making — people might do violence to the man, so we’ll punish him rather than those who might do violence.

As to the woman complaining he posted no anti-Bush signs. Seriously? You know how many times I’ve read “Bush Chimp” or “Bush lied” or anti-Bush Katrina signs (including in trips to New Orleans). Pleeeeease!

Here’s the former CEO of American Express, Harvey Golub, expressing a less than complimentary opinion on the business savvy of the Obama Democrats:

Meanwhile, [President Obama] he’s ignored entitlement reform, retarded the development of our energy resources, and added new layers to our regulatory burden. He’s also increased the uncertainty inherent in an already dysfunctional and perverse tax code, added trillions to our national debt, spent taxpayer money ineffectively and inefficiently, tried to micromanage the economy, and acted as an incompetent venture capitalist by investing in “green jobs” and high-speed rail. This administration routinely grants and withholds favors by substituting its judgment of what is valuable and good for that of the people. What stimulus spending can do to create jobs is entirely temporary, whether in the public or private sector, and is rooted only in a political calculus.

Well said, sir.

It takes a lot of hubris to believe in the concept of central planning. The idea that a bunch of government “experts” could plan strategies and execute decisions in the free market better than the collective choices of 300 million American consumers — plus millions more globally — takes, to quote Hillary Clinton, a willing suspension of disbelief.

And yet here we are with a trifecta of failures in which the government thought it could determine winning companies.

Let’s start with General Electric, which of course began its crony capitalism relationship with government long before the Obama Democrats too power, but nonetheless continues to receive mountains of taxpayer subsidies based on its “Green” technologies. These are technologies — such as their hyperexpensive light bulbs, wind turbines that provide nothing if the wind isn’t blowing, and absolutely Orwellian carbon credit trading schemes –  which no consumer seems to really want and which wouldn’t survive in an unsubsidized environment.

It is particularly galling, given that the former GE CEO is now Obama’s job czar, and that GE is one of those favored government companies that enjoys paying $0 in taxes — this even as Obama, from the other side of his mouth, attacks “millionaires and billionaires” attempting to do the same. The reason? Because it provides American consumers with things they don’t want and produced with their tax dollars.

But as said, subsidies are as old as the apostles. The next two examples are far more sinister.

First, Soylendra: Despite repeated warnings from private auditors like PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP that the Soylendra solar-panel manufacturing company was a a lousy investment, the Obama administration nonetheless assisted it in receiving $535 million in federal loan guarantees. All that taxpayer money is now gone, Soylendra having declared bankruptcy in early September, and raided by the FBI a few days later.

ABCNews reported that “the White House closely monitored the Energy Department’s deliberations over a $535 million government loan to Solyndra,” and ultimately backed the loan despite warnings from White House employees. Worse, the Obama administration promised that should the company fail they would work to recoup losses of private investors — but we taxpayers are screwed. This is something that should be investigated, says former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy:

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law — compassionate conservatism in green bunting — is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry — as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

As if that weren’t bad enough, a key Obama supporter named George Kaiser was also involved in Soylendra, and “contributed $10,000 to the Urban Health Initiative, a notorious program created by now-First Lady Michelle Obama while she was at the University of Chicago Medical Center.” Oh, yeah, nothing to see here.

Rubbing Obama’s nose in this steaming, smelly mess, Forbes Magazine terms it a “teachable moment.” Says Forbes:

The fact that federal loan guarantees were even necessary for Solyndra tells us that few, if any, lenders thought that giving the firm money was a very good idea.  Given the fact that lenders who bet “right” on companies with strong prospects but insufficient capital are lenders who will make money, we can rest assured that hundreds if not thousands of bank loan officers took a long, hard look at Solyandra and said … no thanks.  Are we to believe that President Obama knows more than all of these profit-hungry capitalists about Solyndra’s real prospects in global solar energy markets?  That President Obama has even stronger incentives than private investors to ensure that money parked in this company or that is money well spent? To ask these questions is to answer them.

Next, Michelle Malkin has been all over a similar Obama embarrassment called LightSquared — a company that is crafting an open wireless broadband network that, regrettably to our national security, overpowers our commercial and military satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.

Where this becomes scandalous is because the White House attempted (but failed) to curb the damning testimony of U.S. Air Force Space Command four-star general William Shelton and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing director Anthony Russo.

General Shelton had noted earlier this year: “Within three to five miles on the ground and within 12 miles in the air, GPS is jammed by [LightSquared’s] towers. . . . If we allow that system to be fielded and it does indeed jam GPS, think about the impact. We’re hopeful we can find a solution, but physics being physics, we don’t see a solution right now.”

Despite industry-wide protests, the firm somehow received fast-track approval for a special FCC waiver that grants LightSquared the right to use wireless spectrum to build out a national 4G wireless network on the cheap. Ken Boehm, of the conservative watchdog National Legal and Policy Center in Washington, D.C., summed up the deal earlier this year: “LightSquared will get the spectrum for a song, while its competitors (e.g., AT&T and Verizon) have to spend billions.”

… LightSquared used to be known as “Skyterra.” In 2005, Obama put $50,000 into the speculative firm — raising eyebrows even among his water-carriers at the New York Times. The paper noted that Skyterra’s principal backers at the time of the investment included four Obama “friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.”

One of those pals who urged him to buy stock in Skyterra was George Haywood, a major Skyterra investor and campaign donor who chipped in nearly $50,000 to Obama’s campaigns and to his political action committee, as did his wife.

Coincidentally, Obama bought his Skyterra stock the very same day the FCC “ruled in favor of the company’s effort to create a nationwide wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications systems.” The Times reported that immediately after that morning ruling, “Tejas Securities, a regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value.”

Coincidentally, Tejas and its chairman, John J. Gorman, were also major backers of Obama — flying him in a private plane for political rallies and pitching in more than $150,000 for his campaign coffers since 2004. Obama sold his stock at a loss in November 2005, but his political relationship with the company was cemented. In 2009, billionaire hedge-fund manager Philip Falcone — whose firm Harbinger Capital Partners is reportedly under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for market-manipulation abuses — acquired Skyterra.

Coincidentally, Falcone, his wife, and LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja have contributed nearly $100,000 between them to the Democratic party during critical White House meeting periods and negotiations over LightSquared’s regulatory fate.

Oh, and coincidentally, there’s $6 billion earmarked for a “public safety broadband corporation” buried in the Obama jobs proposal just as LightSquared pushes into that market, too.

It’s all just one strange quirk of timing, Team Obama shrugs. Except, as we all should know by now: There are no coincidences in Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Just an endless avalanche of quids, quos, and taxpayer woes.

I think it goes without saying that were Obama’s last name Bush or Cheney the term “LightSquared” could be well known in American households.

I’ve long said that the liberal super-rich elites like George Soros and Warren Buffet are disingenuous phonies. (Go ahead and add Barack Obama to that list).

Both supremely successful businessmen and investment bankers, they made his bones with the tax code we have, but now seek to further stifle other entrepreneurs who would seek to do the same.

A few weeks ago George Soros sat before Congress and urged higher regulations on the investment world. Shortly after that, however, Soros announced that his group was taking advantage of a Congressional loophole — or what he called in a letter to investors, “exception” — by restructuring his firm as a “family office” and return outside investors’ money in order to avoid the pain that comes with complying with new Frank-Dodd regulations.

But even worse is Warren Buffet — his influence is so great he attempts to craft tax policy with Obama Democrats.

Never mind that even as Buffet argues for paying more taxes he could cut a check to the U.S. Treasury to pay whatever extra he sees fit as “fair.” And never mind that, like Soros, Mr. Buffet lobbies for and takes advantage of tax breaks that benefit he and his fellow Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, such as was done in Berkshire’s recent investment in Bank of America.

The real charade involves a clever bait-and-switch upon those ignorant of tax policy. Consider that only one of the following statements is true:

1. Warren Buffet pays a lower capital gains tax rate than his secretary’s income tax rate.
2. Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary’s tax rate.
3. Warren Buffet pays a total tax amount that is less than his secretary’s total tax amount.

Statement 1 is the only truth. But it is only true because Mr. Buffet doesn’t earn his fortune from a salary, and hence isn’t taxed with an income tax (a max rate of 35%), such as his secretary. Rather, Buffet earns his fortune off of the buying and selling of stocks, which is taxed under capital gains (a max rate of 15%). It’s comparing apples to oranges. (Oh, and while we’re at it, since Mr. Buffet and his secretary get to craft tax policy de facto, shouldn’t the American public be privy to their tax records?)

Even if somehow Buffet paid a total tax pecentage (all taxes) less than his secretary, it’s just not the rule for the vast majority of high-income earners. Adds a WSJ analysis:

[According to IRS data] But nearly all millionaires still paid a rate that is more than twice the 8.9% average rate paid by those earning between $50,000 and $100,000, and more than three times the 7.2% average rate paid by those earning less than $50,000. The larger point is that the claim that CEOs are routinely paying lower tax rates than their secretaries is Omaha hokum.

What makes it all particularly slimy is how Mr. Buffet, like most expert liars, drapes himself in half-truths, in this case to take advantage of the public and to portray himself as the champion of the middle class. But even comparing his capital gain tax rate to his secretary’s income tax rate, it doesn’t hold water. It’s simply untrue:

What he doesn’t say is that much of his income was already taxed once as corporate income, which is assessed at a 35% rate (less deductions). The 15% levy on capital gains and dividends to individuals is thus a double tax that takes the overall tax rate on that corporate income closer to 45%.

Notice that Warren Buffet never said to raise his “capital gains tax rate” to be more than that of his secretary’s “income tax rate.” Nor did President Obama propose the same. Instead, the president defines his new “Buffet tax” to raise taxes on th0se “making more than $1 million a year.”

That could mean a great many things of course, but one suspects the president has no intention to touch capital gains so much as raise income taxes. He’s already detailed his plan to end the Bush tax cuts for those families make more than $250,000 — or as Obama calls them: “millionaires and billionaires.”

But it’s not class warfare, Mr. Obama promises. Yet if it’s not class warfare why bother at all?

Were the federal government to tax everyone making $1 million or more at 100%, they would only net $400 billion in revenue, which is 2.7% of the national debt, or just 11% of Obama’s 2011 budget, or enough to fund the government for a few months.

Meanwhile, the top 1% of wage earners already pay 38% of all federal income taxes while the bottom 50% paid only 3%. At what percent would Obama Democrats consider the top 1% taxed as “fair”?

And if it’s not class warfare then how is it that the gains won’t make a dent in the national debt or federal deficit?

According to the New York Times, the president’s plan to abolish the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 is expected to bring in merely $0.7 trillion over the next decade, or about 0.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product per year. As a comparison, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the deficit over the same period is going to be $13 trillion, more than 6 percent of GDP per year.

While not many details are yet know, any tax on “making more than a million” could crush small businesses, because unlike investment bankers most small businesses are organized as such that they pay a personal income tax rate (this includes sole proprietorships, partnerships, s-type corporations and limited-liability companies [llc]).

In other words, Obama isn’t going to raise Warren Buffet’s taxes at all, rather he’s going to raise taxes on business.

And let’s say Obama does plan to raise the capital gains tax (which is the opposite of what President Clinton did to spur the economy) there’s every reason to believe that the rich will simply do what Soros and Buffet did above to reduce their tax bill, while those less savvy investors (i.e. the middle-class investors) would suffer.

Or, take Obama’s plan to eliminate taxation loopholes. While most would be all for this if it meant a truly fair tax policy (for example a flat tax, or elimination of the income tax in favor of a national sales tax) eliminating tax loopholes would not harm the George Soroses and Warren Buffets of the world — but it would definitely hurt the middle class:

[Washington Post] As President Obama and congressional Republicans argue over how to rewrite the U.S. tax code, the debate has revolved around “loopholes” for corporate jets and ending “carve-outs” for well-heeled special interests. But if the goal is debt reduction, that’s not where the money is.

Broad tax breaks granted to millions of families at all income levels dwarf the corporate giveaways. Over the past two years, largely because of these popular benefits in the federal income tax code, the government has reached a rare milestone in tax collection — it has given away nearly as much as it takes in.

The number of tax breaks has nearly doubled since the last major tax overhaul 25 years ago, with lawmakers adding new benefits for children, college tuition, retirement savings and investment. At the same time, some long-standing breaks have exploded in value, such as the deduction for mortgage interest and the tax-free treatment of health-insurance premiums paid by employers.

All told, federal taxpayers last year received $1.08 trillion in credits, deductions and other perks while paying $1.09 trillion in income taxes, according to government estimates.

Only about 8 percent of those benefits went to corporations. (The write-off for corporate jets equals about .03 percent of the total.) The bulk went to private households, primarily upper-middle-class families that Obama has vowed to protect from new taxes.

Finally, there’s every reason to believe that a “millionaire” tax today will simply hit the middle class many years from now, as has already happened with the 1960′s Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which while constructed for just 155 people, now affects 4.5 million American filers, and would affect another 20 million were it not for an annually passed Congressional bill to exclude them.

Any way you cut this, it’s tax warfare — tried and true for a president who spent $3,820,000,000,000 in 2011 alone, and is about to run for re-election with near 10% unemployment.

This week Rep. Allen West (R-FL) officially apologized for an e-mail he sent belittling Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla) — or did he? Both parties are now denying the apology.

To be honest, I did read West’s e-mail rebuke of Wasserman-Schultz and it was indeed over the top. But that’s not the story here. The bigger story regards blatant bias and hypocrisy by the mainstream media and Democratic Party (these are of course redundant terms).

A few days ago House Democratic women called for a rebuke of Rep. Allen West (R-Fla) for his “sexist” verbal insults against Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

But, ironically, and laughably, this came after days of saturation coverage that questioned if Republican Minnesota presidential candidate Rep. Michelle Bachmann has what it takes to be president because — drum roll — she reportedly suffers from migraine headaches!

Naturally there’s a better chance of Barack Obama switching parties and adopting the economic principles of Adam Smith than there is these same House Democratic women to likewise come to the defense of unfair and sexist attacks against Republican women like Michelle Bachmann.

Worse, the media’s criticism appears to be, “You can’t be president, honey, you’ve got a headache.”

Where’s the outrage over the media’s “historic and systemic” sexism from Reps. Gwen Moore (Wis.), Lois Capps (Calif.), Jackie Speier (Calif.), Donna F. Edwards (Md.) and Carolyn B. Maloney (N.Y.)?

Once more, like the standard of racism, the Democratic standard of what is or is not sexism applies to only one party – theirs.

Just yesterday I posted that the Obama cult demonstrates an increasing disconnect from and disregard of economics, but this example of disrespecting the American public takes the cake.

[Associated Press] Secretary Steven Chu came out swinging Friday against a House bill that would repeal a 2007 federal law effectively outlawing older forms of incandescent bulbs—an effort at energy conservation that has inflamed a wide swath of Americans who don’t care for the more expensive alternatives.

In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Chu said the more-efficient bulbs required would save consumers money over the life of the product, even if the up-front price is higher.

“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” he said.

Talk about the nanny state run amok. Sec. Chu is going to have to point out to us which section of the U.S. Constitution empowers the government to judge what private spending is or is not “wasting” money, and what gives them the power to trump decisions by individual consumers.

Not to mention, I’ve owned my fair share of these mercury-laden “efficient” bulbs and found them lacking – many times the price of typical incandescents yet having lasted not much longer.

A common definition of hubris is when panels of unelected bureaucrats believe they can make better economic decisions than 300 million consumers in the marketplace. But worse, not only are our they not Constitutionally empowered, but their expertise is typically incorrect and filled with unintended consequences.

Finally, I think this retort by Mark Steyn on Team Obama’s hypocrisy is great.

More to the point, I wonder if Secretary Chu has any idea how stupid this argument sounds from an administration that has wasted more of other people’s money than anybody else on the planet. Secretary Chu and his colleagues took a trillion dollars of “stimulus” and, for all the stimulating it did, might as well have given it in large bills to Charlie Sheen to snort coke off his hookers’ bellies with. (In my weekend column, I touch on only the most lurid and outrageous of the government’s many smart investment decisions: its use of stimulus dollars to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry.)

Chu on that come election day.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

The president has a point about “tax breaks.” We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that’s a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies — equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he’s issued — what is it now? — over a thousand “waivers” for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn’t, tough.

But that’s the point. Big Government on America’s unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA), and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it’s not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you’re a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today’s Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives — if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin American–style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass. On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he’s outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.

That’s all, folks!