Conservative Ben Stein Calls For Tax Hikes on Millionaires, Billionaires

I read that he is himself a millionaire.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/conservative-ben-stein-calls-tax-hikes-millionaires-billionaires

By James Zilenziger
July 11, 2011

Ben Stein, an economist, actor, and conservative writer, said taxes should be raised on millionaires and billionaires to help reduce the federal deficit.

“I am in favor of greatly raising the taxes on very wealthy people, millionaires and billionaires. I wouldn't raise the taxes on people making $250,000 a year,” said Stein in a June 29 interview on The O’Reilly Factor, guest-hosted by Laura Ingraham.

Earlier, on June 25, Stein had told Cavuto on Business, “We've got to raise taxes. There's just no way around it. The deficit situation is so serious that while I wish we did not have to raise taxes, we just can't cut spending enough. I wish we could. We can't. We have to raise taxes.”

“Mr. Obama is going to have to do it,” said Stein. “I don't know if the Republicans in the House will go along with it. If they don't, there will be a genuine crisis, and I am frankly frightened about it. I'm extremely concerned about it.”

In the interview with Ingraham, Stein defended his position, saying, “Look, it's a basic arithmetic thing; it's not an ideological thing. We are spending an enormous amount of money that we're not covering with tax revenue; we're borrowing it. At some point we're going to have so much debt that there's going to be a crisis and there will have to be austerity measures here just as they were in Greece.”

Congress has the right to raise taxes on the rich and the president can sign it into law, said Stein, who added that the very wealthy are “not paying enough.” He also said that one “cannot correlate low taxes with high productivity.”


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