Wall Street Journal op-ed, The Tax-Me-More Lobby Doesn’t Pay More, by Stephen Moore:

I wish I had a dollar for every time a wealthy liberal has declared he thinks he should pay more taxes. That list includes Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Gates Sr., Mark Zuckerberg and even Barack Obama, who now says that not only should rich people like him pay more taxes, they want to pay more. “I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me,” he said of his tax-hike plan. “They want to give back to the country that’s done so much for them.”

The idea that the nation’s primary wealth and job creators—i.e., the people who carry the bulk of the tax load—aren’t doing enough for the country is a bit insulting. But the president is right that there is a seemingly endless number of terribly wealthy, guilt-ridden individuals who want Americans to pay more taxes.

So why don’t they? There is a special fund at the Treasury Department for taxpayers who want to make “gift contributions to reduce debt held by the public.” But very few do. Last year that fund and others like it raised a grand total of $300 million. … There are also a handful of states, including Arkansas, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, that have set up accounts for people who want to contribute more to the public fisc, but the amount raised in these states is generally in the thousands of dollars, the equivalent of a rounding error in state budgets. …

Liberals bristle at the charge that they are pro-tax hypocrites and even ridicule the idea that they should voluntarily pony up more in taxes when they lobby for tax hikes. …

What liberals don’t get is that there are patriotic reasons for strongly opposing higher tax rates. To name a few: Higher tax rates will damage the economy and throw Americans out of work. Higher taxes, history proves, won’t be used to balance the budget but to finance government expansion. And higher taxes take the pressure off Congress to make the deep spending cuts that are so urgently necessary.

If wealthy liberals want to pay more for wind-energy grants, wool and mohair subsidies, high-speed rail to nowhere, National Public Radio and two years of unemployment benefits for nonworking Americans, I’m all for it. But don’t hold your breath, because when liberals say they want higher taxes, they mean on you.