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Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

nytimes.com

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Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#71

Post by kenjackson »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #20

If we want shared sacrifice, maybe we should ask people at the bottom to share as well. Anecdotes of Warren Buffet's office aside, in general the richest people pay the largest proportion of taxes. We already lean quite heavily on the top 1% - the top 1% actually pays more in taxes than the bottom 90%. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/22652.html A graph of the data in that article: http://i.imgur.com/wa8uu.png…

I love the lies with statistics.

"We already lean quite heavily on the top 1% - the top 1% actually pays more in taxes than the bottom 90%."

The chart of course only shows federal income tax.

What about federal payroll? What about excise taxes? And at the state and local levels, what about sales taxes?

Here's a much better link:

http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_things_the_ric...

From this article you'll note:

This year the first $9,350 of income is exempt from taxes for singles and $18,700 for married couples, just slightly more than in 2008. That means millions of the poor do not make enough to owe income taxes.

But they still pay plenty of other taxes, including federal payroll taxes. Between gas taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes and other taxes, no one lives tax-free in America.

When it comes to state and local taxes, the poor bear a heavier burden than the rich in every state except Vermont, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated from official data. In Alabama, for example, the burden on the poor is more than twice that of the top 1 percent. The one-fifth of Alabama families making less than $13,000 pay almost 11 percent of their income in state and local taxes, compared with less than 4 percent for those who make $229,000 or more.

and

It’s true that the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 38 percent of the federal income taxes in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available). But people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government.

Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes (known as payroll taxes) are paid mostly by the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. That’s because, once you reach $106,800 of income, you pay no more for Social Security, though the much smaller Medicare tax applies to all wages. Warren Buffett pays the exact same amount of Social Security taxes as someone who earns $106,800.

Don't let some fool you into believing that the poor don't pay their share of taxes. They do.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#72

Post by rdtsc »

ck2 wrote: post #46
breck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre—what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation. -Ulysses S. Grant Peo…

I've come to the conclusion that the logic becomes "well if I can't have it, no-one will". People basically trying to take away assistance/help to others by trying to vote it away from everyone, since they somehow perceive themselves as better than others suffering on the lower rungs on society. This also explains why people try to vote away unions and benefits for teachers/schools, the very foundation of society, wh…

There is a another process that takes place

"I am not poor, I am just pre-wealthy".

The biggest scam is that the wealthy have managed to convince even the poorest that they are just a "little hard work" away from being a successful owner of family business or the next Donald Trump. It is the American Dream.

So ... they should vote accordingly and just get their future selves those nice tax cuts for when they become wealthy.

There is also the good'ol "trickle down" trick. Vote for us and we'll trickle it down, we promise...

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#73

Post by ginsweater »

geebee wrote: post #55
drblast wrote: post #14

Voluntary gifts of money can be sent to the U.S. Treasury at this address: http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html One has to ask, if any super rich person really considered the U.S. Government a worthwhile investment, why are they donating to various charities instead of to the Treasury?

The problem is that gifts to charity aren't coercive. I know, it's strange to say that it's a problem if it isn't coercive, and I'd agree that many of the inefficiencies of government stem from the coercive nature of taxes (no need to convince people to give you money if you can just take it by force). But I'm really a moderate in all of this - I personally don't think a modern state can survive on donations, or a "p…

It's not just that - even when we're talking Warren Buffett here, the scale of the US govt is totally different. Buffett's entire fortune ($50B according to Wikipedia) would only cover a few weeks' worth of borrowing and then we're right back where we started only Warren Buffett has no more fortune. It's silly to say we should expect him to do that.

What he's saying by advocating tax raises is "I will pay more if I know that everyone else will also pay more." He's not interested in paying $XM to reduce the debt by $XM, but he would happily pay a personal cost of $XM if it meant reducing the debt by $XB.

(This is called "collective action," and it's also Groupon's business model.)

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#74

Post by [deleted] »

wpietri wrote: post #50
andrewflnr wrote: post #37

Warren buffet pays about 17%, and the people in his office pay an average of 36%. So the solution, the way to restore fairness, is to raise taxes on him? I don't really think so. Maybe I'm a bit of a wingnut, but I find tax rates of about 30% disgusting simply on moral grounds, and I don't see why the discussion should go much further. Surely one of a government's prime constraints should be not screwing its citizens…

I don't feel like I'm getting screwed. As a small business owner, I think I get fantastic value for the taxes I pay every year. It could be better, sure, but having lived on 4 continents, it's here that I've chosen to live and start my latest business.

[deleted]

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#75

Post by mmorett »

aj700 wrote: post #39

Taxing the money that moves - as it is earned - will only produce so much revenue. The rich need to be taxed, not beccause it will allow lots of lovely spending, because the gov will inevitably do a bad job of spending it. Though you could put it towards debt reduction first. You have to tax the money that doesn't move. The millions of unneeded unspent $ that the rich are sitting on, with a wealth tax. You may not ev…

> You may not even make the poor richer, but you will make the rich poorer. Good.

"Unneeded, unspent money" is none of your business. It's not your money.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#77

Post by lotharbot »

wpietri wrote: post #45
yummyfajitas wrote: post #20

If we want shared sacrifice, maybe we should ask people at the bottom to share as well. Anecdotes of Warren Buffet's office aside, in general the richest people pay the largest proportion of taxes. We already lean quite heavily on the top 1% - the top 1% actually pays more in taxes than the bottom 90%. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/22652.html A graph of the data in that article: http://i.imgur.com/wa8uu.png…

> If we want shared sacrifice, maybe we should ask people at the bottom to share as well. Do you actually know anybody at the bottom? I would be fascinated to hear what you'd suggest someone cut when they're earning ~10-15k/year. For those likewise unfamiliar, I recommend sci-fi author John Scalzi's "Being Poor": http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ Both the article and the comments are worth reading.

> Do you actually know anybody at the bottom?

yummyfajitas lives in Pune, India. Read through his comment history for comparisons of the rich in India to the poor in the US; it's eye-opening.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#78

Post by TheSkeptic »

MikeCapone wrote: post #41
TheSkeptic wrote: post #34

Funny. Buffett certainly didn't mind a little coddling in 2008. He was arguably one of the largest individual beneficiaries of bailouts which shifted ungodly amounts of toxic debt from failed private institutions to taxpayers. See http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/2009/08/04/buffetts-b... . While it's now mighty generous of Buffett to invite the government to increase his taxes, he could spare us another ( http:…

The whole financial system and everybody that depends on it was a beneficiary of the bailouts. If everything collapsed, everybody would have suffered. Buffett just happens to own a bigger slice of the market than almost anyone, so of course he benefited significantly. But singling him out, especially since he's stayed away from wall street's games and made extraordinary efforts to keep things above board for decades,…

You should do your research before making statements like "especially since he's stayed away from wall street's games and made extraordinary efforts to keep things above board for decades."

Buffett didn't sit idly by while his holdings were threatened. He lobbied for, and supported, bailouts.

Not content with bailouts of companies he owned large stakes in, he made sweetheart deals to invest in Goldman Sachs and GE knowing what was going to happen. Have you ever explored those?

If his GS and GE investments aren't convincing enough, here are a few choice examples of the Oracle of Omaha's hypocrisy:

1. While he promotes higher tax rates for high-earning individuals, he lobbied against a tax that would have sought to recoup TARP losses from bailed-out banks (see http://abcnews.go.com/Business/buffett-bank-tax-higher-rich-...).

2. Buffett once famously warned that derivatives were deadly, but when it came time to put his money where his mouth was, he lobbied against proposed derivatives regulations that would have cost Berkshire billions (see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/buffett-lobb...).

3. In 2010, Buffett once defended the ratings agencies (see http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2010/jun/03/buffett-d...), but apparently he's only willing to defend them so long as they agree with him (see http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/08/05/buffett-to-fbn...).

Bottom line: whatever one may have once thought about Warren Buffett, his actions over the past several years make it clear he is no investor, he is a corporatist. And quite a successful one at that.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#79

Post by jeffreymcmanus »

dantheman wrote: post #40
BrainScraps wrote: post #16

Reading this just makes me think of all of the lobbying dollars and campaign contributions that must have been paid by the super-rich to get these tax breaks. Am I the only one that feels some populist rage welling up when he hears how much money is wasted on campaigning for office and influencing people in office? Aren't there more worthy uses of wealth and scarce resources? And it just pains me that so many people…

They only do that because it pays off. If the government was more decentralized and controlled significantly less dollars the incentives wouldn't be there and it wouldn't happen. It's a structural problem that happens in any system. Where power is concentrated it becomes beneficial to influence it - the more concentrated the more that can be spent.

It's not necessary (or even wise) to decentralize government in order to remove the influence of money on politics.

One relatively easy change that would almost completely remove the quid pro quo bribery effect of campaign contributions is to anonymize contributions so that candidates never know who their contributions are coming from. That way there would be no payback possible, and influence peddling through campaign contributions would become a thing of the past.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#80

Post by makecheck »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #20

If we want shared sacrifice, maybe we should ask people at the bottom to share as well. Anecdotes of Warren Buffet's office aside, in general the richest people pay the largest proportion of taxes. We already lean quite heavily on the top 1% - the top 1% actually pays more in taxes than the bottom 90%. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/22652.html A graph of the data in that article: http://i.imgur.com/wa8uu.png…

Ask yourself how much you need to make in order to live comfortably, and feel "rich enough". Maybe $100,000/year would do it in most parts of the country? And probably a lot less.

Now suppose you had a million dollars (and just a million, ignoring these billionaires for the moment). That mean you could risk, without really blinking an eye, $900,000 on any investment; even if you lost every penny, you'd still be left with enough to live "well" and feel pretty "rich". At no point would you fear missing your next meal or losing the roof over your head, and you probably wouldn't care if you had a job. Of course, the odds of losing all $900,000 are slim; you'd probably see some payoff, and never really approach that unfortunate low.

Rich people will always have opportunities to make money that the poor will never have. Even if you tax a millionaire or billionaire at a very high rate, they'll have enough money left over to take many risks and very likely end up richer anyway. At the very least, they won't miss the money that went to taxes.

Now suppose you only make $15,000/year. Not only would it take years to reach the above "rich" $100,000 level, but you'd be insane to risk much of that low income on any investment: failure means you come out with zero and miss your next meal and lose your house. If they're lucky, these people may have a handful of investment opportunities and ways to become richer; if they screw up, most of those opportunities go away forever. Taxes at the bottom won't fix anything at all.

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