Quick Hits Headlines

Greg Sargent hits Chris Christie dead center.

In an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, NJ Gov. Chris Christie attacked Warren Buffett for calling for higher tax rates on the wealthy. “Yeah, well he should just write a check and shut up,” Christie said. “Really. And just contribute. The fact of the matter is that I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check. Go ahead and write it.”

Let the nailing begin.

It’s kind of remarkable that Republican officials in positions of real influence and responsibility continue to repeat this silly line in public without any apparent sense of embarrassment.

Let’s try to walk through this really slowly. The problem that Buffett and other wealthy people are trying to solve by calling for higher taxes on their class isn’t simply that they as individuals would like to be contributing more towards the tax burden, but can’t. Rather, the problem as they’ve identified it is a society-wide one: We need a massive boost in revenues to keep society functioning at acceptable levels and to address profound and in­trac­table fiscal problems that threaten the country’s future.

This problem will not be solved if Warren Buffett writes a check. Buffett’s point is that the scale of the problem requires his class as a whole to chip in a bit more to solve it. So doing will require relatively minimal sacrifice, and will prevent more of the burden for maintaining a functioning society — which helps enable wealth in the first place — from falling on those who are far less equipped to bear it. This won’t happen unless taxes are raised on the very wealthy. Voluntary contributions won’t quite cut it. This requires a society-wide solution.

Nothin’ but net. Buffett’s got a lot of money, but he can’t make a dent in the national debt. A bunch of Warren Buffetts can. What Christie — and the rest of the Republican Party — is doing in response to Buffett’s argument is pretending to be stupid. At least, I hope they’re pretending. They pretend to completely misunderstand what he’s saying, which allows them to offer a strawman in response.

“By the way, the ‘just shut up’ response to inequality is not exclusive to Christie,” Sargent points out. “As you’ll recall, the GOP’s likely standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, recently opined that we should confine our discussion of these matters to ‘quiet rooms.’”

That’s because it’s an argument for which they have no answer. They want us to shut up about it, so they can stop pretending to be so dumb.