Steve Schwarzman: Even Rich Americans Need To 'Give Something Up' To Narrow Deficit

The billionaire who last year compared Obama's attempts to raise taxes on private equity firms with Hitler's invasion of Poland, on Monday said even rich Americans will have to "give something up" to help narrow the deficit.

In response to a question about raising taxes on the richest 2 percent of Americans, Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire founder of private equity giant, the Blackstone Group, said the deficit was serious enough that almost everybody in society would have to "give something up." (Scroll down for video.)

"And no one's going to like it," Schwarzman told Bloomberg. "It's like medicine in the old days that tasted really bad, but if you didn't take your medicine, you weren't going to get healthy," he said of the attempts to effectively end the Bush-era tax cuts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/26/steve-schwarzman-tax_n_853709.html

 

Taxes are too high now. Look at this chart:

<img src="http://www.cbpp.org/images/4-13-11TopTenTaxCharts1.jpg">


Even Australia is beating us.

 

yea but low tax rates keep our economy strong and our businesses hiring. right?

 

Even Rich Americans Need To 'Give Something Up' To Narrow Deficit
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Just out of curiosity, Why?

If the answer is the rich have it and you don't, is not really a reason.

Why is the deficit a problem for the rich?

 

That's right! We've got to do something about the Australia problem.

 

Because the rich are the only ones with money. And both the mainstream Right and Left refuse to gut the War Machine or Entitlements. That leaves us with two options (borrow or tax).

Problem with that is income taxes are wealth destructive.

 

My thought on your first point was similar. Deficits undermine the country's ability to wage war, and the US military is the only muscle most of the world's rich have any control over.

Disagree with your last point as an unqualified equality. Income taxes have underwritten the development of large scale technological innovations which have in their turn created great wealth. (Two-edged sword analogy applies here, admittedly.)

 

Well, I would expand the first point and submit Fortune 100 basically own Congress and have twisted it towards their end.

As for taxes, income taxes are wealth destructive because they punish work. The higher income taxes are, the less people work. Work is wealth. Therefore, as income taxes increase, productive output invariably declines. That's one reason. There's a few others.

I agree that military has spawn great commercial inventions. But wouldn't the private sector make those same breakthroughs, eventually?

 

Have you seen the rate of increase in the national debt since Regan? It is pretty much exponential. IMHO it has reached a point of no return. Maybe that's just me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

 

All the millionaires I know aren't that way because of their annual income. In fact, none of them need the income.

Then what?