The "Buffett Rule's" stated goal of making millionaires pay the same tax rates as the middle class is appealing. Unfortunately, the proposal is based on inaccurate claims about the tax system and its enactment would penalize the investment that fuels long-run economic growth.

Peter Schweizer has gotten lots of press on the charges in his just published book, Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and the Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Crony Capitalism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison, that members of Congress made major moves in the stock market in response to information they received from top Treasury and Federal Reserve officials.

The White House has proposed a “Buffett Rule” mandating that taxpayers earning more than $1 million pay at least 30% of their income in federal income taxes. The unfairness the Obama administration has identified is only one limited, albeit  eye-catching, manifestation of more systemic problems in the tax code.

Taxing a mere 0.3 percent of the population, as the House health care reform legislation intends, is not a sustainable way to pay for health care reform.

The real question is not whether millionaires should pay more than the middle class, but whether they should pay more than they do today? Raising millionaires' taxes may seem fair--they can obviously afford to pay more. But, this policy has significant economic costs.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow and Andrew Rugg is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. The views expressed in this article are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect those of any other person or institution.

In this article, Bowman and Rugg discuss the public's opinion about...

Ready for the battle in November? You probably think I’m talking about the election. No, I’m talking about the battle around your Thanksgiving table. The dinner conversation will turn to politics and the economy, and it will be your job to stick up for capitalism and free markets.

We're about to enter a very long campaign in which where an apparently squeaky clean Mitt Romney is going to be demonized for his success and dragged through the gutter. Meanwhile, Obama took cash from a true denizen of the gutter.