米娜的密钥 在线:巴菲特这一次错了 双语

Like Monty Python’s crime-fighter The Bishop, Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Warren Buffett arrived late last week to the congressional argument over the debt crisis. By the time he published his broadside in the New York Times to the effect that billionaires like himself are being “coddled” by US politicians, Republicans had already staved off tax increases until after the next elections. Both parties had passed $1,500bn in deficit reductions to a bipartisan committee unlikely to call for tax increases. And Standard & Poor was sufficiently unimpressed to downgrade the US credit rating.

就像喜剧团体蒙提•派森(Monty Python)塑造的那个总想打击犯罪的“主教”(The Bishop)那样，伯克希尔哈撒韦公司(Berkshire Hathaway)首席执行官沃伦•巴菲特(Warren Buffett)上周姗姗来迟，加入国会关于债务危机的争论中。他在《纽约时报》(New York Times)上发表了一篇炮轰美国政府的文章，大意是像他自己这样的亿万富翁正在受到美国政客的“娇惯”。文章发表之前，共和党已经把增税推迟到下一次大选之后。民主党和共和党向一个两党联合委员会提交了总规模达1.5万亿美元的减赤计划，而该委员会不太可能要求增税。这一计划仍不足以说服标准普尔(Standard & Poor’s)，它仍然决定下调美国信用评级。

Mr Buffett believes taxes on the “mega-rich” ought to go up, in the name of both fairness and debt reduction. He paid just under $7m in federal taxes last year, about 17 per cent of his taxable income. But his back-office employees pay 36 per cent. It is a spreading problem. In 1992, the top 400 US earners made $16.9bn and paid 29.2 per cent in taxes. Today their income is $90.9bn and they pay 21.5 per cent.

巴菲特认为应该提高“超级富豪”的税负，这既是出于公平的考虑，也是出于削减公共债务的考虑。他去年缴纳的联邦所得税不到700万美元，大约是他应税收入的17%。但他的后台员工要缴纳36%的所得税。这是一个越来越广泛的问题。1992年，美国挣钱最多的400名富豪总收入为169亿美元，缴纳了29.2%的所得税。如今，他们的收入为909亿美元，缴21.5%的所得税。

The rich pay less because capital gains and carried interest get taxed at a low rate. As Mr Buffett puts it, “those who make money with money” are treated better than those who “make money from a job”. In saying this, Mr Buffett subscribes to the religious understanding of money that was universal in the Christian world before the rise of Florentine banking (and of Protestantism) and has been restated in our own time by practitioners of Islamic finance. People are alive but money is not, which makes it wrong – because it is life-denying – to prefer the latter.

富人的税负更低是因为资本利得和附带权益(carried interest)的税率较低。如巴菲特所说，“那些以钱生钱的人”获得的待遇优于那些“靠工作挣钱的人”。巴菲特这样说，实际上是赞同了在佛罗伦萨银行业（以及新教）兴起之前、基督教世界普遍认同的宗教金钱观念，这种金钱观在当代又得到了伊斯兰教金融从业者的重新解读。人是有生命的，而金钱没有，因此看重金钱而不看重人是错误的，因为这样是对生命的不尊重。

It is a powerful and even a beautiful argument, but there are two problems with it. The first is that just because something is time-honoured moral wisdom does not make it workable capitalist fiscal policy. Economics, in fact, prides itself on throwing aside such wisdom. It is inconsistent to argue on Christian grounds that paying interest on “sterile” money is sinful and then to argue on Keynesian grounds that thrift in a downturn is inefficient.

这是一个有力、甚至赏心悦目的论点，但其中存在两个问题。首先，不能仅仅因为某一观点符合古老的道德观念，就认为它能成为可行的资本主义财政政策。实际上，经济学的骄傲就在于它把这种道德观念抛在一边。一边站在基督教的立场，认为向“不会开花结果”的金钱支付利息是罪恶的，一边站在凯恩斯主义的立场，认为在经济下滑的时候节省开支是无效的，这种做法本身就前后不一。

The demands of efficiency and of equality have always been at odds, but they seem to be coming ever further out of synch. The UK’s coalition government is riven over whether to keep Labour’s 50p-in-the-pound rate on incomes over £150,000. Whether one sides with the Tories (who would scrap it), or the Liberal Democrats (who would keep it, or find a substitute), it is striking how little revenue it raises: about £3bn a year.

对效率和公平的要求向来是矛盾的，但两者现在似乎变得越来越难以同步了。在是否维持工党提出的对与年收入15万英镑以上人群征税50%的问题上，英国联合政府产生了分歧。不论是支持保守党（主张取消这一高税率），还是支持自由民主党(Liberal Democrats)（主张保留高税率，或者用别的政策代替），这一政策带来的税收都少得令人吃惊：每年只有大约30亿英镑。

There is a second inadequacy in Mr Buffett’s suggestion. Polls show a majority of Americans want rich people’s taxes raised. But soaking billionaires will not suffice to address the deficit and debt. The main US tax quarrels concern Mr Buffett (or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who stood alongside Barack Obama in April to announce that he was “cool” with seeing his taxes rise) only indirectly. The anger comes from a middle and upper-middle class that feels bankers and idlers have been freeloading off them. To view upper-middle class fury as an ideological preference for a small state is probably wrong. It is more a tax strike, based on the suspicion – one that arose during the debate over last year’s health care bill – that the middle class is being looted.

巴菲特的建议还有一点不足。民调显示，大多数美国人都希望对富人增税。但加重亿万富翁税负并不足以解决财政赤字和公共债务问题。美国关于税收的主要争吵只与巴菲特有间接关系。Facebook创始人马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)也是一样。他曾在4月份站在奥巴马(Barack Obama)身边表示，他对于增税“没有意见”。怒气来自中上层中产阶级，他们感到银行家和那些游手好闲的人从他们身上不劳而获。把上层中产阶级的怒火理解为他们对小政府的意识形态偏好，很可能是错误的。更确切地说，这是怀疑自己被掠夺了的中产阶级的一场罢税，而这种怀疑早在去年关于医改法案的辩论中就已经产生了。

Doing as Mr Buffett suggests might actually exacerbate this problem. If those 400 mega-rich people could be taxed on their earnings at the top 35 per cent income tax rate, it would raise an extra $12bn in taxes. If they could be made to pay 50 per cent – an unlikely scenario, to judge from the UK’s difficulty maintaining such a rate – that would raise an extra $26bn. In an era of trillion-dollar deficits, soaking the mega-rich would get the country between an eightieth and a fortieth of the way to a balanced budget. Taxing the half-million- and million-dollar-a-year men, would help a bit. The rest would be loaded onto the backs of the same upper-middle class whose fury grows by the day.

采纳巴菲特的建议实际上可能恶化这个问题。如果能够对那400名超级富豪以35%的最高所得税率征税，将会增加120亿美元的税收。如果以50%的税率征税，能够增加260亿美元税收——但从英国维持这一高税率的难度来看，这种情况不太可能发生。在财政赤字以万亿美元计的时代，对超级富豪课以重税，只能解决财政平衡八十分之一到四十分之一的问题。对年收入达到50万美元或者100万美元的人增税，能够起到一点作用。但余下的负担就都落在那些怒火日益高涨的上层中产阶级身上了。

The amount the rich are taxed is only one element of a larger problem – their influence over the political system. In the US, much of this influence comes through campaign contributions, but even more comes through the deductibility of “charitable” contributions. Mr Buffett himself has urged rich people to give half their wealth to philanthropy. This makes inequality look less embarrassing on paper, but it worsens the problem of plutocratic influence, because the deductibility effectively harnesses a taxpayer-funded matching contribution to the whims of the rich.

对富人的征税金额只是一个更大问题的一部分，那就是他们对政治制度的影响力。在美国，这种影响力的很大一部分来自竞选捐款，但更大一部分来自可税前扣除的“慈善”捐款。巴菲特本人已经敦促富人捐出一半财富用于慈善。这使得社会不公平在表面上看起来不那么难堪，但它恶化了富豪的政治影响力问题，因为慈善捐款的可税前扣除，实际上使得普通纳税人的捐款不可能与富人心血来潮的捐款相匹敌。

The suggestion of Vince Cable and other UK Liberal Democrats that a tax on large mansions be used to replace or supplement the 50p rate shows that things have gone further than Mr Buffett realises. The proposal has a mid-twentieth-century feel to it. It is a sign that what the public is eyeing covetously is no longer just the incomes of rich people but also their wealth.

文斯•凯布尔(Vince Cable)和其他一些英国自由民主党人士建议，用豪宅税来代替或补充50%的所得税率，这表明事态发展已超出了巴菲特所料。这一建议带有20世纪中期的色彩。它标志着，公众的眼光不再只盯着富人的收入，还盯着他们的财产。

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

注：本文作者系美国《旗帜周刊》(The Weekly Standard)高级编辑