“[T]hat’s the famous line where he basically says, ‘I am going to raise the rate, even if it decreases the amount of revenue,’” Krauthammer said. “This is insane. The purpose of taxation is to raise revenue and to pay for stuff the government has to do. That’s the only reason the government swipes your money.”

◼ Krauthammer: Obama’s Buffett rule push ‘an embarrassment,’ ‘so shameless,’ ‘deceptive’ - Jeff Poor/The Daily Caller

“It’s literally incredible,” Krauthammer said. “It’s almost an embarrassment. It’s so shameless. If you were to collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years, that’s longer than the life of this republic, you will not have covered the deficit — Obama’s deficit — for 2011. You collect it for another 250 years, so we’re now in the year 2612, and you’ve covered 2011 and 2012, and you need to cover only 498 other years of deficits.”

The underlying policy goal of putting the Buffett rule in place, he explained, is to raise the capital gains tax, Krauthammer said, and Obama has been less than up-front about that.

“This is a preposterous statement and he knows it is,” he continued. “Also on growth, it is equally deceptive. What the tax is, it’s a doubling of the capital gains tax. It’s disguised, but that’s the reason why the Buffett rates are lower, it’s the capital gains rate and it’s lower than the rate for normal income. So he doubles it.”

“The reason that’s not a good idea is because when you double the rate, you actually decrease the amount that the Treasury receives. And you decrease the growth because you are shrinking the pool of capital that is out there that people can invest and hire other people. The reason that we had an economic boom after the Kennedy tax cuts and the Reagan cuts, 20 years later, it’s precisely that they cut rates and particularly that they cut capital gains rates.”

◼ Why Are the Rich Still Enamored of Obama? - Austin Hill