Billionaire Warren Buffet, the sage of Omaha, had an eye opening op-ed today in in the Sunday New York Times:

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. … If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

Buffet notes he paid less than 18% in taxes, as compared with the middle class employees in his home office who paid around 35%.

Via Gus Lubin at Business Insider

Something reeks in this nation, and the source of the stench comes straight from hard-right ideologues like the ones making up Texas Governor Rick Perry’s base. And Perry had an odd take on the growing third-world income distribution in the US. He’s complaining about the tiny 2.5% sliver in the pie chart; you middle class working stiffs aren’t paying enough:

We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax. And you know the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more. We are indignant about leaders who do not listen and spend money faster than they can print it.

Of course Perry fails to mention that those ‘freeloaders’ earn a tiny fraction of the income, or that they’re soaked by sales and consumption taxes of the type Perry and his ilk would love to hike, or that they pay more payroll taxes than Warren Buffet. The chart shows networth, i.e., wealth, of which that bottom half has very little of. About the only tangible asset they have is the Social Security and Medicare they’ve built, the same assets assholes like Perry think are unconstitutional. Code for an implicit promose to rip off the last cent these folks have and feed it to the wealthy elite who fund his perverse campaign and cheer his sick ideology.

But then that’s Rick Perry’s platform. Cut taxes for Paris Hilton and stick it to the rest of us. The same as it ever was. In the history of mankind, nothing has been easier and more cowardly than sticking up for the wealthy and privileged, and that’s Gov Perry in a nutshell. If he had lived in ancient Egypt he would have been chasing Moses and trying to mow down the Exodus, in Roman times he would have been standing next to Caesar watching early Christians being fed to lions. Today he works for the Koch brothers. What a classic scumbag.