This is actually a nifty little vid, perfect viewing for a slow news night. If it looks familiar, it should: Robbins is using this post by Iowahawk — to whom he gives full credit — as a springboard for his demonstration. It’s a simple yet vivid walkthrough of why a serious deficit reduction program doesn’t start with taxing the rich. There just aren’t enough of them to go around and, for all the heavy breathing about “the one percent,” they don’t have nearly enough wealth between them to get us into the black. Which is why, of course, even Obama has taken care to acknowledge in each of his thousand speeches about the Buffett Rule that a surtax on millionaires won’t get us out of the hole. He wants low-information voters to think that it will — that’s why he devotes so much time to talking about a dumb gimmick — but the this-won’t-do-much-to-solve-any-serious-problem disclaimer is usually duly buried somewhere in the transcript, hopefully to be overlooked by the audience as they f
ocus on “fairness” instead. To see just how unserious it is, click play.
Update: I’d totally forgotten, but commenters remind me that Bill Whittle did a variation of this same video more than a year before Robbins got to it.
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