foundation, the top 1% pay more in taxes than the entire bottom 90%. the rich paid 19% of taxes and now pay 35%. when you look at it that way and you can slice these numbers a lot of different ways, that sounds like they re certainly paying more than their share. it s one set of numbers. i think they should pay their fair share. people now have agreed with the top marginal rate at 39.6 which is what they paid under president clinton. we had a marxist paradise with 23 million jobs and more billionaires created than under reagan or any other presidency. the notion that mr. perkins raises perhaps. easy word 0 throw out there? but what the heck is it? it sounds to me when people use that rd would, they re saying it should be more. if they re already paying more than the bottom 90%, how much more. they re not. it s like cigarette smokers may all the cigarette taxes.
would you consider resigning over this? i think my job is to get this fully implemented and to get the website working right. reporter: she knows how to navigate tumultuous political waters. daughter-in-law of a former republican congressman from kansas, and wife of a federal judge. i think she learned a great deal from that and i think it has served her very well. reporter: the this isn t her first health care battle. as governor of kansas, sebelius, a catholic, drew the wrath of the church for vetoing a restrictive anti-abortion bill, tried to expand health care coverage through cigarette taxes. she sought to bring premiums down but critics say she drove insurers out of the state by regulating them too much. they felt like they were in a position where it was not profitable to do business in kansas. so it limited our choices for health care providers. reporter: ron pollack, a close ally, says see bell yus
republicans demanding that the health and human services secretary kathleen sebelius, lose her job over the botched obama care website roll out. brian todd is covering the story for us. brian, sebelius really on a hot seat right now. she s certainly has a lot of political experience. she s been through a lot of pressure in her life. give us a little background. well, she does have experience dealing with controversy before this, wolf. that also relates to the arena of health care as kansas governor, sebelius tried to enact sweeping health care reform there with mixed results. she tried twice and failed twice to finance health coverage through cigarette taxes. now she did win as insurance commissioner in the mid to late 1990s, a battle with blue cross, blue shield to keep premiums down. but one of her opponents, former kansas republican congress mann todd tiahrt just told me over the phone he believes insurance companies departed kansas under her leadership because she made
medicine, here are the behaviors, we would like yu to do. get used to it. economically, from a purely economically what happens when you start to tax that stuff? you build in the tax revenue in budget. then people use it less. so tax revenues decline. you keep taxing them more. you mention cigarettes. but cigarette taxes decline. that s the problem. they don t get as much. so it s an economic irrationality that, you know, this works in terms of helping the budget. they keep doing it. i know. they will keep doing it. they did it with cigarettes. all the cigarette bonds right now, close to it. good point. charlie gasparino, no better business reporter on the planet. none. no better sources. none. all right. well, you know, we really never could find this guy s weapons of mass destruction. we just found this guy s chemical weapons. pretty massive destruction. we drew a line in sand on
which is good. right. and we re going to institute the buffett rule which he presents as an ethical claim on the fair share. i think they re problematic ways to finance the government. on cigarette taxes, it s the most regressive major tax that the governments levy. it is effective in reducing smoking rates. fewer people to smoke. it causes people to smoke less. a problem that creates is it s a declining source of revenue as the cigarette tax works and gets people to quit smoking, the revenues taper off. we re going to have the cigarette tax to pay for this program. over time, the revenues become insufficient to pay for the program. i also think if something like universal pre-k is of a lot of value, you ought to make a case for the public to finance it with a broad based tax. the president comes in and says we re going to have a major expansion of the federal government and create a universal health care entitlement, but somebody else will pay for it. with the exception fts ciga