Bushes' 2006 tax bill: $186,378 - Yahoo! News

Actually, I'm not really interested in the fact that that the Bushes' 2006 tax bill: $186,378 - Yahoo! News. I'm more interested in the fact that the President of the United States, a going concern with a budget of over a trillion dollars and at least a couple million employees (if you count the military), has a salary of $400,000. People, I think that the President of the United States should be the highest paid citizen in the country. Make his salary the cap, and then adjust all the rest to what they actually should be...

Really, if you want your sports stars, entertainment personalities and corporate executives to make tens of millions of dollars per year, then give your President a slightly larger amount. After all, he is the person who guides our societies destiny for his term in office. So, put a marginal tax rate of 100% on every dollar of earned income in excess of what the President makes. Be sure to include in the definition of "earned" income such things as performance royalties and bonuses. Allow people who build or create things to gain riches from those sources, but make sure that huge fortunes do not get passed on to heirs who have done nothing on their own to derserve such wealth. (If the holders of great wealth wish to create charitable foundations to preserve and distribute income from those fortunes, sobeit. That I can live with.

To get back to those taxes, my wife and I, together, made a little more than 1/3 of what the George and Laura paid in taxes, yet our tax rate was within a few percentage points of theirs. This is not equitable. What George and the rest of the "gimme mine" crowd forget is the concept of "noblesse oblige". For those who do not recognize this concept, it basically states that those who have more have a moral obligation to help those who have less. This can mean sharing your cardboard refrigerator carton with someone who doesn't even have that to "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." Nobless oblige falls somewhere between those two extremes, but this generation of Americans have turned their collective back upon that concept. So, I say tax the rich more and more heavily on each and every one of those marginally incremental dollars.