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Ben Stein interviews Warren Buffett, whom he describes as "one of the smartest men on the planet" (in his office, which Stein describes, as obliged by standard journalistic technique when talking about Buffett, as "unpretentious"). Here's the summary, a la Stein:

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

Huh? The "deficit gap" (which would seem to be a redundancy -- it's either a "gap" or a "deficit," but not both) is, by definition, an amount of taxes not paid by anyone. So how can the rich pay a disproportionately small percentage of taxes that nobody pays in the first place?

Thanks to Jameson Campaigne for the link.

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