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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

#131

Post by yummyfajitas »

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.

Scalzi's article about "Being Poor" is definitely not a description of poverty in the United States.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713461

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#132

Post by scottjad »

Warren is omitting very crucial information and knowingly deceiving most people. He's pretending he doesn't pay very many taxes, but he does, he just pays different taxes. In this article he mentions capital gains, income, and payroll taxes but does not mention corporate income taxes. Corporate income taxes are taxes on the owners of corporations. I don't know exactly how much he paid, but some quick math I'd guess he alone paid 1.6 billion last year in corporate income taxes. (Berkshire paid 5.6 billion, Warren's worth 53 billion, Berkshire 178 billion, giving Warren 29% ownership, if you have better numbers feel free to share). So he mentions 6 million dollars in taxes but omits 1.6 billion from the discussion.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#133

Post by intended »

TheSkeptic wrote: post #78
MikeCapone wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

Hmm, long laundry list, and somewhat valid.

Yet he is the only one who amongst the super rich in America who is talking about raising taxes. He is doing this specifically because of the positive impact it would have on finances for the country, despite the fact that this would have a disproportionate/fair share effect on his tax payments.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#134

Post by Locke1689 »

danenania wrote: post #101
j_baker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our deficit is $14.6 trillion. TARP, which cost ~$80 billion (with still more to be paid back), is a rounding error in that deficit. Changing tax rates would have a much bigger impact on the deficit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program#P...

TARP is a rounding error all right--compared to the $16 trillion the Federal Reserve has provided to private banks behind the scenes. TARP was just political theater. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/21/audit-fed-gave-16-tril...

No. This thread is a font of misinformation. The Federal Reserve lent $16 trillion in total transactions at the primary credit interest rate to banks over years worth of time. This number is clearly cited to provoke populist rage but is completely ridiculous when analyzed intellectually.

Look, consider this analogous situation. You're having trouble meeting your short term debts but had a solid line of income so you come to me and say, "I need $10 for lunch today but I can pay you from my paycheck at the of the day." I know you have a job and confirm your paycheck so I say, "OK. I'll lend you the money." So Monday comes and goes and you pay me back. Now, times are tough so you have to do this for a full 2 weeks before you can get back on your feet. During this time I lent you $10 on Monday, got payed back on Monday, $10 on Tuesday, etc. At the end of the two weeks would it be accurate to say I lent out $100? No, because I only really lent out $10 at a time. In fact, I really just lent out the same $10 ten times.

This is exactly the same situation. The $16 trillion is in total amount of money lent but it doesn't actually reflect any amount of money lent at any given time.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#135

Post by mnemonicsloth »

reader2000 wrote: post #113
chailatte wrote: post #106

The combined wealth of American's billionaires is only $1.5 trillion. [1] If we taxed them 100%, it would only pay off our budget deficit for one year. We still have around 54 trillion total debt to pay down. Not to mention 115 trillion unfunded liabilities. And which entrepreneurs would be stupid enough to work 14 hours a day and hire workers, knowing that the government will tax them 90%? They would all flee the co…

Stop fabricating numbers. The US National debt is about $14.5 trillion, not anywhere close to 54 trillion. Btw, the Bush tax cuts — costing $1.8 trillion from 2002 to 2009 — are a big reason we got into this deep hole. Buffet: I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

It's not a made-up number.

US debt to bondholders is around $14.5 trillion.

The US also promised Medicare and Social Security payments to retirees that are underfunded by $59 trillion:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-28-federal-b...

The numbers will vary here according to longevity and interest rates, but the bill is huge, and it will have to be paid with tax money.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#136

Post by ebiester »

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…

A family of 4 starts paying tax at around $27,000. They're already paying 6.2% in Social Security and 1.45% in Medicare. (This is also matched by the employer.) That's $2,066.

I want to know how many dollars they should pay in taxes. So, we've said social security and medicare is $2,066. How much should a family of 4 making $27,000 be taxed?

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#137

Post by systemtrigger »

dmayle wrote: post #24
a5seo wrote: post #9

What's missing is an estimate of the revenue impact of doing what Buffet suggests. I've always heard that this kind of policy would add little to revenue, because there is simply far more tax money available by taxing earned income.

If you just count the top 400 income earners in the US that he mentions in the article, and they restore the the 1992 rate of 29.2% (as opposed to the 21.5% of 2008), then we're talking about 7 billion dollars

Check your math. $16.9 billion * (29.2% - 21.5%) = $1.30 billion.

As to the additional revenues Buffett wants from the 236,883 richest households, if we assume the average of those households had taxable income of $5 million and if we raise their rates by 10% we get $118 billion.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#138

Post by dreww »

webXL wrote: post #89
ck2 wrote: post #22

The problem is getting low to middle income people to stop voting against themselves. Good luck with that, they all seem to think they are going to be billionaires someday so better keep those billionaire taxes low. Either that or by bribing the wealthy with low taxes they might only ship out half the jobs overseas instead of all of them. It's just dumbfounding. Election after election, over and over.

This assumes low to middle income people are single issue voters and that issue happens to be the effective tax rate of billionaires. What's dumbfounding is that there are people who believe that wealth is zero-sum, and that by taking from the rich and giving to the poor, "justice" would be done, never taking into account what produces wealth or the fact that living standards have improved despite the rich getting ri…

living standards have improved despite the rich getting richer.

Citation needed. Please explain how the living standard in the US can have improved if real wages have fallen. Oh wait, the answer is an incredible increase in consumer debt. That seems to be working out.

Keep calm and carry on.

Re: Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

#140

Post by danenania »

Locke1689 wrote: post #121
danenania wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The whole financial system and everybody that depends on it was a beneficiary of the bailouts. If everything collapsed, everybody would have suffered." A narrative convenient for powerful banks that was created by powerful banks and allied politicians. People have suffered and continue to suffer because of the crimes these institutions have committed. Propping up their corpses only helps the criminals who created th…

The entire US financial system is based on credit and liquidity. Clearly something had to be done. Do I agree that the bailout was the best way to do that? No. But a timely bad plan was better than an untimely good one. By the way, the argument that nothing needed to be done is opposed to practically every economics departments' opinion in the country. Maybe you know more about economics than we all guessed, but I th…

The something that clearly needed to be done was to make the perpetrators pay for the damages of their crimes, not the victims. If the US financial system collapsed, there would be a deflationary shock and the short term high unemployment associated with an economic realignment, but the country would be much healthier financially in the long term. Instead the crisis is simply being dragged out, with the inevitable day of reckoning certain to be much worse because of it.

The amount of money the US has pumped into its corrupt financial system is enough to put its entire population on welfare for years. A sane approach would have been to let the banks fail, let the markets tank, and ease the transition as needed with bottom-up debt relief and aid.

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