On the recordJuly 17, 2012
For those of us not invited to the local Dairy Queen for a Blizzard with the oracle of Omaha, the Warren cited in this quote is none other than Warren Buffet. He is a friend of mine--you know, the same Buffett from which the Buffett rule or Buffett tax is named. Setting aside the ridiculous notion that Americans are as oblivious to taxes as cattle are to the purposes of the slaughterhouse they are being led into, this quote very accurately illustrates the liberal attitude toward taxes, which is that they always need to go up. This chart illustrates government revenue as a percentage of GDP. Look at that. The purple line is total government. The red line is Federal Government. The green line is State and local government. When we combine them, we get the purple line, which is well over 25 percent for most of the time, from 1970 up to 2010. There are some fluctuations, but over the last 40 years, revenues have been roughly stable. We can see in the past 10 years a dip around the time the so-called Bush tax relief was enacted, followed by a rebound as the tax cuts promoted growth, followed by a dip in revenues as the recession set in. We can see that it came down around 2000, went up a little more, and then came down again. According to the CBO, as of June 5, 2012, Federal revenues averaged 17.9 percent of GDP over the past 40 years.…
