Patriotic CEO's Call for Higher Taxes

The meaning of the word "patriot" took a big hit with "The Patriot Act."

Now it's just getting kicked while being down.

From The Washington Post:

Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein says he’d entertain higher taxes to break the budget impasse. “No one is so unpatriotic that they wouldn’t pay a little bit more to resolve it,” the firm’s CEO said Thursday on CNBC.

So does the CEO of Caterpillar. “I, for one, believe that revenue has to increase. I think every American would pay more if they thought spending was going to be cut and the budget brought to balance,” Douglas Oberhelman told The Wall Street Journal.

Both are part of a new “Fix the Debt” coalition of business leaders who are pushing for Congress to reach a grand bargain on the deficit that avoids the fiscal cliff through spending cuts, entitlement reform, and revenue raisers. Other members include JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, and Honeywell’s David Cote, the FT reports.

It is now "patriotic" for the government to expropriate more of your money. I also find it funny that these two enlightened CEO's include everyone in their clarion calls:

"No one is so unpatriotic..."
"I think every American would pay more..."

So, in "the land of the free", there isn't one person that would like to pay less?

If that's the case, then the accounting industry is in deep trouble.

The aforementioned "Fix the Debt" coalition contains a nice harmonious mix of big business CEO's and government bureaucrats.

The bureaucrats get high profile CEO's who will stump for more "revenue raisers;" and in return, the CEO's get help from government in building moats around their companies, to keep out competitors.

Hillary Clinton has defined the arrangement: "The problems we face today will not be solved by governments alone. It will be in partnerships..."

It's their world, as a recent Time Magazine cover indicates.

Everyone else is here to be patriotic....and pay up!