Warren Buffett is a tough negotiator, which is one reason why he’s the second-wealthiest person in America.

So when the President refers to his new initiative to raise taxes on millionaires as the “Buffett rule” we might expect he’d start the bargaining from a tough position.

But this is Barack Obama, whose idea of negotiating is to give away half the house before he’s even asked the other side for the bathroom sink.

Apparently Obama will propose that people earning more than $1 million a year pay at least the same tax rate as middle-class earners. That’s aiming mighty low.

America’s median income is about $50,000. The typical taxpayer at that level pays approximately 20 percent in taxes. 

Granted, that’s a higher rate than most of today’s super rich pay because of countless deductions, credits, and loopholes – including, especially, their ability to take their incomes in the form of capital gains, taxed at 15 percent. That’s a big reason Buffett’s hundreds of millions a year are taxed at just over 17 percent – a lower rate than his secretary faces, as Buffett often says.

But a 20 percent rate is still ridiculously low compared to what millionaires and billionaires ought to be paying. Officially, income over $379,150 is supposed to be taxed at 35%.

And even 35 percent is a pittance compared to the first three decades after World War II. Before Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the rich in 1981, the highest marginal tax rate was over 70 percent. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even if you include deductions and credits, the rich are now paying a far lower share of their incomes in taxes than at any time since World War II.

The estate tax (which only hits the top 2 percent) has also been slashed. In 2000 it was 55 percent and kicked in after $1 million. Today it’s 35 percent and kicks in at $5 million. Capital gains – comprising most of the income of the super-rich – were taxed at 35 percent in the late 1980s. They’re now taxed at 15 percent.

Meanwhile, the top 1 percent’s share of national income has doubled over the past three decades (from 10 percent in 1981 to well over 20 percent now). The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. And they’re doing better than ever. The last time the top 1 percent got that much was in the roaring 1920s.

So much money is now concentrated at the top that what we really need are more tax brackets at the high end, higher marginal rates in each bracket, and a tax code that treats all sources of income – whether ordinary or capital gains – the same.

The marginal tax rate ought to be raised to 50 percent on income between $500,000 and $5 million, 60 percent on income between $5 million and $15 million, and 70 percent on income over $15 million.

In light of our history, and in the face of future budget deficits that will otherwise cause taxes to be raised on the middle class and government services to be sliced, this is the least we should expect from the richest among us.

Why shouldn’t the President be calling for this, instead of asking that millionaires and billionaires pay at a rate average earners pay?

At least begin from a tough negotiating position, Mr. President. You might as well. Congressional Republicans will oppose any tax increases on the wealthy, whom they call “job creators” – even though big companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash and aren’t creating any jobs at all, while 99 percent small-business owners, who account for most new jobs, make under a million dollars a year. (GOP Budget chief Paul Ryan has already accused the President of waging “class warfare” with his millionaire tax plan.)

And you can also bet Republicans, as well as their allies on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, will continue to harp about the large portion of low-wage earners who pay no income taxes – without mentioning that they pay a higher portion of their incomes than anyone else in payroll and sales taxes.

Besides, the public supports raising taxes on the rich. (In an August CBS News/New York Times survey, 63% of respondents favored increasing taxes on households earning more than $250,000 a year to help close the budget deficit.)

We don’t yet know the details of the President’s proposal. The White House hasn’t said what the minimum rate on millionaires will be, or how they’ll define a “middle class” income. Maybe he’ll surprise us by starting out much higher and tougher.  

I hope so. But as he’s proven time and time again, when it comes to negotiating Barack Obama is no Warren Buffett. 

Two cheers for the President and his America’s Jobs Act. Cheer Number One: In presenting it to a joint session of Congress, he sounded as passionate and determined as he’s ever sounded.

Second cheer: He laid out the problem correctly and effectively. He explained why jobs and growth must be the nation’s first priority now – not the federal deficit. The economy is in crisis. People are hurting. So government must act, and act quickly. It’s irresponsible at a time like this to suggest that government should simply close down.

But a jeer because the jobs plan he presented isn’t nearly large enough or bold enough to make a major dent in unemployment, or to restart the economy.

$450 billion sounds like a lot – and is more than I expected – but some of this merely extends current spending (unemployment benefits) and tax cuts (in Social Security taxes), so it doesn’t add to aggregate demand.

The net new boost to the economy is closer to $300 billion. That doesn’t approach even half the gap between what the economy is now producing and what it could produce at or near full employment.

And much that $300 billion is in the form of temporary tax cuts to individuals and companies. Some of these make sense – enlarging the Social Security tax cut, extending it to employers, and giving small businesses a tax holiday for new hires.

But temporary tax cuts haven’t proven to be particularly effective in stimulating new spending in times of economic stress. People tend to use them to pay off debts or increase savings. Companies use them to reduce costs, but they won’t make additional hires unless they expect additional sales – which won’t occur unless consumers increase their spending.

That leaves some $140 billion for infrastructure – improving outworn school buildings, roads, bridges, ports, and so on. And $35 billion to help cash-starved states avoid more layoffs teachers. Both good and important but still small relative to the overall need.

Why did the President include so many tax cuts, and why didn’t he make his proposal sufficiently large to make a real impact on jobs and growth? Because he crafted it in order to appeal to Republicans. To get it enacted, he needs their votes.

I’m having a dizzying sense of déjà vu. The first $800 billion stimulus (spread over two years) wasn’t nearly large enough given the drop in aggregate demand. And half of it was in the form of tax cuts. The reason it wasn’t bigger and contained so many tax cuts was to get Republican votes. But its apparent ineffectiveness – it saved around 3 million jobs, but that didn’t save it from appearing to fail – made it harder for the White House to do anything more to stimulate the economy, and ward off what’s likely to be a double dip.

That’s been the heart of Obama’s dilemma. Big and bold enough to make a difference, and Republicans are certain to reject it. Small and focused on tax cuts, and maybe Republicans will bite. But even if they sign on, what’s the point of the exercise if it won’t have a measurable effect on jobs and growth?

And why would they sign on this time, anyway?

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell scoffs “This isn’t a job plan. It’s a reelection plan.” That’s precisely the problem. McConnell and company have stated publicly that their number-one objective is to unseat Obama and regain the presidency in 2012. They don’t want to give the President anything he could possibly claim as a victory. And they’re not terribly worried if the economy stays awful through Election Day because that’s the best way to fulfill their number-one objective.

The President would have done better with a plan that was big enough to make a real difference. And then, when Republicans rejected it, campaign on it.

So two cheers – for both the President’s style and his words. And one jeer: He failed on substance and strategy. 

THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s Analytics. That should come as no surprise. Our society has become more and more unequal.

When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into debt — which, as we’ve seen, ends badly. An economy so dependent on the spending of a few is also prone to great booms and busts. The rich splurge and speculate when their savings are doing well. But when the values of their assets tumble, they pull back. That can lead to wild gyrations. Sound familiar?

The economy won’t really bounce back until America’s surge toward inequality is reversed. Even if by some miracle President Obama gets support for a second big stimulus while Ben S. Bernanke’s Fed keeps interest rates near zero, neither will do the trick without a middle class capable of spending. Pump-priming works only when a well contains enough water.

Look back over the last hundred years and you’ll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income — as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 — the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats.

During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion — as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day — growth slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It’s no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 — the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

Starting in the late 1970s, the middle class began to weaken. Although productivity continued to grow and the economy continued to expand, wages began flattening in the 1970s because new technologies — container ships, satellite communications, eventually computers and the Internet — started to undermine any American job that could be automated or done more cheaply abroad. The same technologies bestowed ever larger rewards on people who could use them to innovate and solve problems. Some were product entrepreneurs; a growing number were financial entrepreneurs. The pay of graduates of prestigious colleges and M.B.A. programs — the “talent” who reached the pinnacles of power in executive suites and on Wall Street — soared.

The middle class nonetheless continued to spend, at first enabled by the flow of women into the work force. (In the 1960s only 12 percent of married women with young children were working for pay; by the late 1990s, 55 percent were.) When that way of life stopped generating enough income, Americans went deeper into debt. From the late 1990s to 2007, the typical household debt grew by a third. As long as housing values continued to rise it seemed a painless way to get additional money.

Eventually, of course, the bubble burst. That ended the middle class’s remarkable ability to keep spending in the face of near stagnant wages. The puzzle is why so little has been done in the last 40 years to help deal with the subversion of the economic power of the middle class. With the continued gains from economic growth, the nation could have enabled more people to become problem solvers and innovators — through early childhood education, better public schools, expanded access to higher education and more efficient public transportation.

We might have enlarged safety nets — by having unemployment insurance cover part-time work, by giving transition assistance to move to new jobs in new locations, by creating insurance for communities that lost a major employer. And we could have made Medicare available to anyone.

Big companies could have been required to pay severance to American workers they let go and train them for new jobs. The minimum wage could have been pegged at half the median wage, and we could have insisted that the foreign nations we trade with do the same, so that all citizens could share in gains from trade.

We could have raised taxes on the rich and cut them for poorer Americans.

But starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It cut spending on infrastructure as a percentage of the national economy and shifted more of the costs of public higher education to families. It shredded safety nets. (Only 27 percent of the unemployed are covered by unemployment insurance.) And it allowed companies to bust unions and threaten employees who tried to organize. Fewer than 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.

More generally, it stood by as big American companies became global companies with no more loyalty to the United States than a GPS satellite. Meanwhile, the top income tax rate was halved to 35 percent and many of the nation’s richest were allowed to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax. Inheritance taxes that affected only the topmost 1.5 percent of earners were sliced. Yet at the same time sales and payroll taxes — both taking a bigger chunk out of modest paychecks — were increased.

Most telling of all, Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses. In so doing, it allowed finance — which until then had been the servant of American industry — to become its master, demanding short-term profits over long-term growth and raking in an ever larger portion of the nation’s profits. By 2007, financial companies accounted for over 40 percent of American corporate profits and almost as great a percentage of pay, up from 10 percent during the Great Prosperity.

Some say the regressive lurch occurred because Americans lost confidence in government. But this argument has cause and effect backward. The tax revolts that thundered across America starting in the late 1970s were not so much ideological revolts against government — Americans still wanted all the government services they had before, and then some — as against paying more taxes on incomes that had stagnated. Inevitably, government services deteriorated and government deficits exploded, confirming the public’s growing cynicism about government’s doing anything right.

Some say we couldn’t have reversed the consequences of globalization and technological change. Yet the experiences of other nations, like Germany, suggest otherwise. Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years, and the gains have been more widely spread. While Americans’ average hourly pay has risen only 6 percent since 1985, adjusted for inflation, German workers’ pay has risen almost 30 percent. At the same time, the top 1 percent of German households now take home about 11 percent of all income — about the same as in 1970. And although in the last months Germany has been hit by the debt crisis of its neighbors, its unemployment is still below where it was when the financial crisis started in 2007.

How has Germany done it? Mainly by focusing like a laser on education (German math scores continue to extend their lead over American), and by maintaining strong labor unions.

THE real reason for America’s Great Regression was political. As income and wealth became more concentrated in fewer hands, American politics reverted to what Marriner S. Eccles, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, described in the 1920s, when people “with great economic power had an undue influence in making the rules of the economic game.” With hefty campaign contributions and platoons of lobbyists and public relations spinners, America’s executive class has gained lower tax rates while resisting reforms that would spread the gains from growth.

Yet the rich are now being bitten by their own success. Those at the top would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of one that’s almost dead in the water.

The economy cannot possibly get out of its current doldrums without a strategy to revive the purchasing power of America’s vast middle class. The spending of the richest 5 percent alone will not lead to a virtuous cycle of more jobs and higher living standards. Nor can we rely on exports to fill the gap. It is impossible for every large economy, including the United States, to become a net exporter.

Reviving the middle class requires that we reverse the nation’s decades-long trend toward widening inequality. This is possible notwithstanding the political power of the executive class. So many people are now being hit by job losses, sagging incomes and declining home values that Americans could be mobilized.

Moreover, an economy is not a zero-sum game. Even the executive class has an enlightened self-interest in reversing the trend; just as a rising tide lifts all boats, the ebbing tide is now threatening to beach many of the yachts. The question is whether, and when, we will summon the political will. We have summoned it before in even bleaker times.

As the historian James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream when he coined the term at the depths of the Great Depression, what we seek is “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.”

That dream is still within our grasp.

[I wrote this for today’s New York Times]

Next Thursday President Obama will unveil his jobs plan.

He’ll choose either Plan A or Plan B.

Plan A would be big enough to restart the economy (now barely growing) and reduce unemployment (which continues to grow). That means spending another trillion dollars over the next two years – rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, creating a new WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, and lending money to cash-starved states and cities.

Republicans will oppose it, of course. They’ll say the stimulus didn’t work the first time (they’re wrong – it saved 3 million jobs but it was way too small given the drop in consumer spending as well as budget cuts by states and cities), and we can’t afford it (wrong again – the yield on 10-year Treasury bills is now 2 percent, meaning this is the best time to borrow. And if growth isn’t restored soon, the debt/GDP ratio will balloon beyond belief). But their real hope is to keep the economy anemic through Election Day 2012 so voters will send Obama home.

That means the President would have to fight for it. He’d have to barnstorm the country, demanding Republican votes. He’d build his 2012 campaign around it, attacking the Republican “do nothing” Congress. He’d give ‘em hell.

Plan B would be a bunch of policy miniatures that would have almost no effect on the economy or employment but would nonetheless be good things to do (extending the Social Security tax cut, extending unemployment benefits, reauthorizing the highway building trust fund, giving employers a tax incentive to hire the long-term unemployed, ratifying trade agreements).

Republicans will oppose it, of course. They’ll say this is no time for new initiatives, that our biggest problem is the size of government, debt, and over-regulation. They’ve been saying almost exactly the same thing for eighty years.

The President would present each of his policy miniatures as a separate piece of legislation hoping to attract enough Republican votes to get something – anything – enacted and declare a victory. He’d then campaign as a leader who can “get things done,” even though the economy is still a basket case.

Which will it be – Plan A or B? Early indications suggest Plan B. The President is now saying his upcoming plan will generate “up to a million jobs.” But with 25 million Americans looking for full-time jobs that’s chump change.

Bad choice.

The night before the President lays out his jobs plan, Republican presidential hopefuls will be holding their first big debate. The winner will be the one who comes off as the toughest fighter for average Americans.

The winner of the 2012 presidential election will be the person who comes off as the toughest fighter for average Americans.

Earth to Obama: Remember Harry (Give 'em Hell) Truman.

Here’s Truman’s acceptance speech at the Philadelphia convention that nominated him prior to the 1948 election:

Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make those Republicans like it… We will do that because they are wrong and we are right… [T]he people know the Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interests and it always has been and always will be… The Republican Party… favors the privileged few and not the common, every-day man. Ever since its inception that Party has been under the control of special privilege, and they concretely proved it in the 80th Congress. They proved it by the things they did to the people and not for them. They proved it by the things they failed to do.

Give em hell, Barack.

Paul Ryan says his budget plan will cut $4.4 trillion over ten years. The President says his new plan will cut $4 trillion over twelve years.

Let’s get real. Ten or twelve-year budgets are baloney. It’s hard enough to forecast budgets a year or two into the future. Between now and 2022 or 2024 the economy will probably have gone through a recovery (I’ll explain later why I fear it will be anemic at best) and another downturn. America will also have been through a bunch of elections – at least five congressional and three presidential.

The practical question is how to get out of the ongoing gravitational pull of this awful recession without kowtowing to extremists on the right who think the U.S. government is their mortal enemy. For President Obama, it’s also about how to get reelected.

(Yes, we also have to send a clear signal to global lenders that America is serious about reducing its long-term budget deficit. But in truth, global lenders don’t need much reassurance. Bond market yields in the U.S. are now lower than they were when the government was running a budget surplus ten years ago.)

Seen in this light, Obama’s plan isn’t really a budget proposal. It’s a process proposal.

Stage 1, starting now and ending in June, requires that Republican and Democratic leaders devise a budget for 2012. Apparently they’ve already agreed to try.

That budget would also include a “framework” for deficit reduction over the longer haul. But that framework will be mainly for show. It will give House Republicans enough cover to vote to raise the ceiling on the amount the U.S. government can borrow. (The vote has to occur before the Treasury runs out of accounting maneuvers, in early July.)

And because the framework’s details will be filled in after Election Day, it will give Obama wiggle room before the election to campaign on his priorities. If he wins big – and if Democrats retake the House – its details will look completely different from what they’d look like in the alternative.

Stage 2 occurs in 2014 – fully two years after Election Day. Then, according to Obama’s proposal, if the ratio of the nation’s deficit to the GDP hasn’t fallen to 2.5 percent (it’s now over 10 percent), automatic across-the-board cuts will go into effect to get it there.

Importantly, these cuts wouldn’t apply to Social Security and Medicare, or to Medicaid and other programs designed for the poor. And they wouldn’t be limited to spending. They’d also apply to tax expenditures – that is, to tax deductions and tax credits.

The betting in the White House is that by 2014 the recovery will be in full force, and the economy will have grown so much that the ratio of deficit to the GDP will be in the range of 3 to 5 percent anyway. That means any across-the-board cuts wouldn’t have to be very deep.

The White House is also betting that a strong recovery will take the sting out of any recommendations to slow the growth of Medicare spending emanating from the Medicare board set up under the new health care law (officially known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board.) Under Obama’s new plan, such proposals will be necessary if Medicare spending grows .5 percent faster than growth of the economy (under the law, it’s 1 percent faster).

All told, it’s a clever strategy. It might well avoid a dangerous game of chicken over raising the debt ceiling. It still allows the President to charge Paul Ryan and other Republicans who join him as ending Medicare as we know it – which they are, in fact, proposing to do. (This may help Democrats win back seniors, whose support for Democratic house candidates dropped form 49% in 2006 to 38% in 2010.) And it gives the President lots of room to maneuver between now and Election Day, and between Election Day and 2014.

But there’s one big weakness. The whole thing depends on the recovery picking up steam. If the economy doesn’t, the process could backfire – leading to indiscriminate budget cuts later on, as well as big cuts in Medicare. Indeed, if the recovery fails to fire up, Obama’s own chance of reelection is dimmed considerably, as are the odds of a Democratic House after 2012.

Yet what are the chances of a booming recovery? The economy is now growing at an annualized rate of only 1.5 percent. That’s pitiful. It’s not nearly enough to bring down the rate of unemployment, or remove the danger of a double dip. Real wages continue to drop. Housing prices continue to drop. Food and gas prices are rising. Consumer confidence is still in the basement.

By focusing the public’s attention on the budget deficit, the President is still playing on the Republican’s field. By advancing his own “twelve year plan” for reducing it – without talking about the economy’s underlying problem – he appears to validate their big lie that reducing the deficit is the key to future prosperity.

The underlying problem isn’t the budget deficit. It’s that so much income and wealth are going to the top that most Americans don’t have the purchasing power to sustain a strong recovery.

Until steps are taken to alter this fundamental imbalance – for example, exempting the first $20K of income from payroll taxes while lifting the cap on income subject to payroll taxes, raising income and capital gains taxes on millionaires and using the revenues to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit up to incomes of $50,000, strengthening labor unions, and so on – a strong recovery may not be possible.