Warren Buffett’s Secretary Might Be a One Percenter

Has the sweet milk of Obama’s class warfare rhetoric taken another sour turn?  I’m talking about Warren Buffett’s secretary.  How could a woman who is only paid $60,000.00 per year (according to her boss) be able to afford two homes while somehow amassing enough annual wealth to put her in a tax bracket that doesn’t even exist for the top1%?

Is Warren Buffett's Secretary a One Percenter?

That’s the question posed in an editorial in yesterday’s Investors Business Daily: Is Buffett’s Secretary a One Percenter?

An ABC News report, for example, says she “pays a tax rate of 35.8%,” in contrast to Buffett’s 17.4%  The very top federal income tax bracket is 35%, not 35.8%, and that doesn’t kick in until a taxpayer has adjusted gross income above $379,150.

Does that mean Bosanek is among the 0.4% of taxpayers whose income hits the top federal bracket? You know, the “1%” Obama and his pals always rail about?

Good question.

In keeping with the spirit of the times, I agree completely with the editorials summation, with a few addendum’s of my own.   If Debbie Bosanek (Buffett’s Secretary) is to be used as a political pawn on the big board of class warfare presidential politics, then we deserve to see what her family’s Tax returns look like.

If she is but a lowly secretary clinging to the bottom of the middle class we deserve an explanation as to why Obama’s IRS  is taxing this woman to the cusp of poverty: 35.8% of her $60K per year salary would be $21,480.00 in taxes.  No one else making 60K is taxed so severely.   Why is the US government punishing Warren Buffett’s secretary in this way?

If ABC mis-stated the tax rate, what is the real rate and on what level of actual income?  And who does her taxes?  They should be fired.  Even Turbo-Tax Timmy Geithner could manage better–maybe a bit late on the filing but you get my point.

Of course the more likely alternative is that everyone is stretching the truth and Bosanek is heavily compensated for her contribution, and the word “salary” is being used in a vacuum that should include other generous forms of compensation.  As the IBD editorial points out, her husband may be quite well off himself, in which case the secretary isn’t paying the top tax rate, her family’s combined income is.  In either of those cases, she would be a member of the 1%, permanently staining yet another state of the union campaign stop with the pall of populist skullduggery, and taking Obama’s hypocrisy, along with the media, to yet another new level.