# Barack Obama — "the Buffett Rule" > [!quote] "Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires. That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that. [[Warren Buffett]]'s secretary shouldn't pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it." > — Barack Obama, Remarks on Deficit Reduction, the Rose Garden, September 19, 2011 ## Context Obama proposed the "Buffett Rule" — the principle that no household earning over $1 million should pay a smaller share of its income in taxes than middle-class families — after investor Warren Buffett publicly noted that he paid a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, a result of preferential rates on capital gains and carried interest. Republicans denounced it as "class warfare"; the measure never passed. ## Why this matters The most recent presidential statement of the tax-fairness principle as a live legislative demand — and the bookend of this collection. Obama's argument is identical in structure to [[Ronald Reagan - the free rides are over]]: the scandal is not that the rich are rich but that the *system* lets them pay a lower rate than working people. That a Democratic president in 2011 was making, almost verbatim, the case a Republican president made in 1985 — and being called a radical for it — is the clearest single measure of how far the consensus has shifted. The Buffett Rule's defeat marks the point where tax fairness ceased to be a shared baseline and became a purely partisan dividing line. ## Verification - **Primary source:** Remarks by the President on the [[National Debt]] / deficit reduction, Rose Garden, September 19, 2011 (Obama White House). The principle is set out in the [White House report "The Buffett Rule: A Basic Principle of Tax Fairness"](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/Buffett_Rule_Report_Final.pdf); see also [Obama White House, "Buffett Rule Facts and Fictions"](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/09/21/buffett-rule-facts-and-fictions). - **Status:** Verbatim from the official remarks. Undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[Ronald Reagan - the free rides are over]] — the Republican president who made the same "millionaire vs. working person" argument in 1985. - [[Harry S. Truman - the wrong kind of tax reduction]] — the earlier defense of the distributional test. - Featured in [[Presidents on Tax Fairness]].