Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.
-spence
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so... write a check Buffet .....between Soros and Buffet..the left sure champion some real low life billionaires
Buffett pretty much owes his entire fortune to the death tax. #^&#^&#^&#^& Patten notes that one of the less renowned legs of Buffett’s business is “a huge casualty and life insurance business which provides massive reserves of cheap capital to support his other two investing activities.”
The third leg of Buffett’s business specializes in the purchase of “family owned businesses at fire sale prices.”
These people were never high rollers, but assets (like farmland) have enough value on paper when it is passed to heirs that their estates end up owing as much as 55% in death taxes. When heirs can’t pay these high taxes without liquidating the business, businesses like Buffett’s development arm swoop in and pick up the property at bargain basement prices.
Back in 1931, the liberal son of an immigrant banker knew what to call this kind of business. Matthew Josephson wrote The Robber Barons to argue that the industrial giants of the 19th century had not created wealth in the right way. They had acted like the feudal barons who for centuries had dominated the mountain passes through the Alps. The great corporations of the Gilded Age "monopolized strategic valley roads or mountain passes through which commerce flowed" just like the old barons-of-the-crags.
Hello, Warren? Isn't your business model exactly the one that so offended young Matthew back in the Great Depression after he got back from a decade living la vie bohème as an ex-pat in Paris? Aren't your businesses sitting at an economic choke-point, exploiting the unintended consequences of bad government economic policy, gouging successful family businesses both coming and going, and exploiting grieving widows?
Warren E. Buffett urged Congress Wednesday to maintain the estate tax, saying that plans to repeal the tax would benefit a handful of the richest American families and widen income disparity in the United States.
Mr. Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, told the Senate Finance Committee that advocates of repeal were “dead wrong” to call the tax a “death tax.”
It would be more appropriate to call it a “death present,” Mr. Buffett, 77, said. “A meaningful estate tax is needed to prevent our democracy from becoming a dynastic plutocracy.”
Several members of the megarich class, including Buffett, George Soros and William Gates, Sr (Bill Gates' father), opposed efforts by the Bush administration in 2001 to eliminate the estate tax. Gates testified in Congress and expressed concern that eliminating the estate tax would reduce charitable donations.
Although there is little empirical evidence linking charitable contributions to a motivation to avoid taxes, giving away your fortune before you die is one sure way to avoid the estate tax.
In 2004, The Wall Street Journal suggested to Buffett that he should make sure his money would go to the government if he felt so strongly about the need for an estate tax. The Journal challenged him not to take advantage of the loophole in estate-tax laws by donating his wealth to a foundation before his death. However, as everyone knows by now, this is exactly what Buffett did when he pledged to give $31 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and another $6 billion to foundations run by his children. typical