E.J. Dionne has a great piece today talking about the Buffett tax plan. Conservatives have been on a constant attack against Warren Buffett over his claims that his tax rate is to low. Of course all the focus has been on Buffet, but there are other’s in Buffett’s tax bracket that feel the same:

Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to “punish” the successful. Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at a recent town hall event in California to raise his taxes, are saying that none of us succeeds solely because of personal effort. We are all lucky to have been born in — or, for immigrants, admitted to — a country where the rule of law is strong, where property is safe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where government protects our liberties.

That is what I have been talking about. The rich got that way because of America, so paying taxes and contributing to help get America moving forward again is the least they can do for the country that made them. The problem is the right wing noise machine. I’ve got many Republican friends who make less than $100,000 a year and yet feel taxes should continue to be cut on the rich. Most of them listen to people like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Of course these talking heads will rally against raising taxes on the rich. Just look at their 2010 salaries:

• Rush Limbaugh – $58.7 million
• Glenn Beck – $33 million
• Sean Hannity – $22 million
• Bill O’Reilly – $20 million

Everyone of those guys would have to pay more under the Buffett plan and everyone of them can afford to. Also, everyone of these guys got rich because of this country. Our freedom of speech is what lead to the rise of these multi-millionaires. This is a freedom that has been bought and paid for by the lives of American soldiers over the centuries, yet none of these fat-cats want to contribute back to this country so that maybe we could pay our soldiers better or provide them with better equipment. Instead they want to keep all their money, watch America crumble around them and roll around in their piles of cash.

The attack against Buffett was orchestrated by the right, mostly by the names I mentioned above. I just wish my friends on the right would realize they are being conned into buying something that will make it worse for them in the long run. Our country can’t continue to survive how it is. Military, Medicare and the interest on our loans alone almost total our governments income and these are three areas the Republicans won’t touch. That means there is no fix to our national debt without raising taxes and if they won’t raise taxes on the people who can afford it, that only leaves us to pay more. It’s not some mathematical complexity to figure this out, just pure common sense.