Yes that is the exact article I was thinking of from a few months ago, thanks spidergoat.
String, fuck off.
String, fuck off.
Warren Buffet: I should be paying a lot more in taxes!
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countezero
Registered Senior Member
And this is typical of people who have so much money that bumping up their tax rate does little to impact their lives (to say nothing of how successful they are in housing their money in ways that it's not taxed).
So who cares really what someone like Buffet says?
I don't think anybody cares about taxing people like him more, but they are not a heck of a lot of people like him -- and no model that I've seen shows going after the rich solves the US debt issue. Plus, whenever the government start talking about the "wealthy" in this country you hear amounts well below Mr. Buffet's income being bandied about. Consider the Bush tax cuts, the threshold there is something like $250,000. That's a long way from $46 million...
Mrs.Lucysnow
Valued Senior Member
You mean billion.
That aside Forbes billionaire list: "There are 1,011 names in this year’s list. United States currently has the most billionaires amongst the world's top 10 but India is expected to soon overtake the United States to gain more billionaires among the world’s top 10 than any other country"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires
Buffet is third on that list. The first is from Mexico, Carlos Slim Helu, coming in first with a cool $53.3 billion and his financial wealth has increased since the list was made.
Here's a fun list. All 50 of them with pictures and how they made their glorious sums.
http://www.theworldsrichest.com/people/all.html
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countezero
Registered Senior Member
Someone else posted his earnings, that's what I was responding to. His networth is something else -- and it's not entirely taxable.
Buffet is donating billions to charity through the Gates Foundation. He's just making the point that the rich are bullshitting when they pretend to need more tax breaks. Which may or may not be the case.
I do think corporations need tax breaks or they will leave (which we don't want to have happen) and very wealthy need to pay much more in tax (they're happy to leave if they want to)
I do think corporations need tax breaks or they will leave (which we don't want to have happen) and very wealthy need to pay much more in tax (they're happy to leave if they want to)
The EU exists as a good example that high taxation will not kill business.
Corporations don't need a damn thing. The problem is not that the corporations are taxed to death, as that is an absurd thing if I've ever heard one. The problem is corporations can go to china and set up shop and pay workers $0.44 cent an hour for overtime and pay people $120.00 a month.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...rker-rights-abused-report-shows-73613147.html
They can also head over to Bangladesh and pay poor workers in sweat shops $0.18 cent an hour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wal-Mart
And these crooked oil companies can just hop over to Nigeria and prop up corrupt governments and pay them out the ass so they can drill oil with NO regulation, destroying communities, polluting all of their water sources and causing health crisis throughout.
http://www.globalissues.org/article/86/nigeria-and-oil
Or they can fly to India and pay them $2.15 an hour. And I assure you, if they could pay Americans $0.18 to $2.15 an hour then they would keep their businesses here.
http://www.paycheck.in/main/officialminimumwages <-India
There's a fatal flaw in how Wall Street operates today. The idea that business is amoral is flatly false and will only serve to be the destruction of any country that believes in this wicked ideology.
I suggest reading some Niall Ferguson if you want to get a clear understanding of the financial issues facing this country today.
"Niall Ferguson’s “High Financier,” the biography of the Anglo-German banker Sir Siegmund Warburg, takes us back to a different era — the 1950s and ’60s — and a different conception of banking. Profits from trading were modest, and bankers made most of their money by giving advice to clients and helping businesses to raise capital. Bankers like Warburg thought of themselves as rather like family doctors, whose job it was to get to know their clients well, understand their problems and act in their best interest — a far cry from the ethos that dominates today’s Wall Street."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/books/review/Ahamed-t.html
If you can find it at a library I suggest you pick it up.
Personally I don't think corp taxes can be raised(they are pretty much "globally set").
What governments can do however, is cut taxes on wage slaves to become exactly equal to the corporate tax + their personal exemptions for being a human being who needs food/water/shelter to live and to raise children...I mean "resources" for the corporation to use later.
Then the governments obviously need to cut services, such a roads to get said resources to work. If the corporation requires a road to get it's resources to work, it can build one...and so on.
What governments can do however, is cut taxes on wage slaves to become exactly equal to the corporate tax + their personal exemptions for being a human being who needs food/water/shelter to live and to raise children...I mean "resources" for the corporation to use later.
Then the governments obviously need to cut services, such a roads to get said resources to work. If the corporation requires a road to get it's resources to work, it can build one...and so on.
countezero
Registered Senior Member
Most EU countries have lower corporate tax rates than the US -- and they have less regulation, which is why IPOs have been shifting to London in recent years.
I was talking about income tax.
The problem is that the extremely wealthy get most of their income as long term capital gains which is taxed at a lower rate.
The arguments for taxing long term capital gains at lower rates are mostly bogus. You can restructure ordinary income to turn it into capital gains income even when their is no risk of capital involved.
Captital gains should be taxed as ordinary income but there should be no capital gains tax on increases in asset values that are just from inflation and are not real increases in value. If one Nation has capital gains tax and other nations don't The extremely wealthy or corporations can play fraudulent but legal games to move their capital gains income to a country where they won't be taxed. Similar games can be played with almost any kind of tax but only the very wealthy are taxed enough to make playing some types of income shifting games worth while.
If we ever do move to sales tax instead of income tax then expect the very wealthy to do more of their personal consumption outside of the USA.
Internet shopping instead of brick and mortar stores or in state internet shops is a form of tax evasion that many of us in high sales tax areas might already be using if we let taxes influence who we buy from.
The arguments for taxing long term capital gains at lower rates are mostly bogus. You can restructure ordinary income to turn it into capital gains income even when their is no risk of capital involved.
Captital gains should be taxed as ordinary income but there should be no capital gains tax on increases in asset values that are just from inflation and are not real increases in value. If one Nation has capital gains tax and other nations don't The extremely wealthy or corporations can play fraudulent but legal games to move their capital gains income to a country where they won't be taxed. Similar games can be played with almost any kind of tax but only the very wealthy are taxed enough to make playing some types of income shifting games worth while.
If we ever do move to sales tax instead of income tax then expect the very wealthy to do more of their personal consumption outside of the USA.
Internet shopping instead of brick and mortar stores or in state internet shops is a form of tax evasion that many of us in high sales tax areas might already be using if we let taxes influence who we buy from.
countezero
Registered Senior Member
Then you would be wrong, I think. The rich are notorious for moving their money out of EU countries to avoid the high income taxation rates.
Or just to EU states that are tax havens, Luxembourg and liechtenstein, even so EU economy is quite good, so my argument was that high income taxes would not seriously harm the economy, ergo the EU, my argument was not that it would scare off the rich, don't straw man.
That doesn't imply that the arguments for taxing long term capital gains at a lower rate are bogus - it just means that the system we have for deciding whether something is "capital gains" or "regular income" is broken.
I'm fine with having low capital gains taxes as an incentive for long-term investment. We just need to prevent people who aren't actually long-term investors taking actual capital risks from getting accounted as such and so receiving huge tax breaks.
The idea of applying capital gains to real gains (rather than nominal ones) is interesting, but probably difficult to implement well and likely to produce a lot of perverse outcomes unless the rest of the tax (and spending) structures are similarly indexed to inflation.
No it isn't.count said:
Typically, those people fight taxes tooth and nail, regardless of circumstances.
If nobody cares about it, than no problem - do it.
As far as making a difference, the income tax restoration (not all the way back to 1965 and the years of prosperity, but merely to the rates set by Reagan) would add about 700 billion a year to revenue. Removing the earnings cap on Social Security would allow a 16% rate cut for everyone and still cover all projected deficits for 75 years. Raising the rates on capital gains would reduce the incentives to outsource or automate labor. Removing the high end breaks on mortgage interest and the like would generate tens of billions without depressing ordinary people's house values any more. And so forth.
countezero
Registered Senior Member
Are you reading the news? The EU is on the brink!?!?!
Enough of the ones the Media hang around say it (Soros, Gates, Buffet, , Bono, Coldplay et al) that's it has become something of an old hat. I tire of it. At the same time, many of these people have huge foundations they put their money in or various other schemes to keep it from the taxman. It's call hypocrisy. Or guilt. Take your pick.
You can't tax the rich out of this -- and nothing I've read says so, nor do any of the reports or committees producing reports. That being said I am not against raising upper tax rates, nor am I against retooling social security so long as benefit reductions are considered (it's a two-part problem). My problem, as I suggested earlier, is that taxing the "rich" ends up being taxing the married couples making more than $200,000. That's not wealth in the same kind of terms that are being sold to people.
On the brink of what?
The only types of societally useful profit motivated investment that might need a tax preference to attract money is the venture capitalist role and employees funding start ups by taking stock options rather than salary and friends and associates funding very small businesses.
Most legitimate capital gains situations in which money is at risk still don't meet the basis for which lower tax rates are argued for because the investment is just buying previous investors positions in established enterprises.
When I by stock in an established company I am not stimulating growth. I will be selling some raw land for a profit but my buying that land did not do some useful growth stimulating function that should be rewarded with a lower tax rate.
A lot of people myself included attempt to buy low and sell high as a way of essentially inserting ourselves between some other seller and buyer for a profit. Just because we medium term investors sometimes hold our positions for more than a year and we provide liquidity and thereby reduce volatility and we help create accurate pricing that sends messages to management and fellow owners does not mean that we essentially investing parasites deserve a lower tax rate. We are parasites because our work at identifying mispriced established investments does almost nothing for the economy and yet we get paid at the expense of the longer term real investors when they sell too low or buy too high. We reduce the real long term investors risk by swooping in when they misprice thereby preventing them from further mispricing but we even further reduce the real long term investors gain by denying them the opportunity to buy investments mispriced to their advantage. I don't think us speculators deserve a tax break.
Only the early stage investors taking risks that lending bank won't take or won't take at reasonable interest rates deserve the tax break of lower capital gains taxes because only these early stage high risk investors are helping the nation to develop new technologies and create jobs.
There might be some situations in or near bankruptcy were the nation benefits from a company not being disbanded in which you could make a case that the investors deserve lower capital gains tax rates.
Corporate executives of established companies being paid in stock options do not deserve low capital gains tax rates. In general when the stock price falls destroying their compensation they are just given more stock options at the new lower stock price to make up for the income they lost. As long as the executives are willing to hold their investment/(salary) for a while (one year as an option +one year as stock) these options will be capital gains not ordinary income. They can sell the previous year's stock to pay to exercise the new options. If the executives are willing to defer their salary for two years and invest enough to afford to exercise their options and are willing to risk any lack of personal portfolio diversification that this might create then if they are paid entirely in options they can be taxed entirely at the long term capital gains rate.
The double taxation argument against taxing capital gains is false. If taxing capital gains is double taxation then taxing bank interest and rental income is also double taxation.
For the most part the investment market rewards risk taking enough that no added tax code incentives are needed to stimulate risk taking.
I don't mind the tax code rewarding people taking societally beneficial risks that are not taken enough but the tax code should not reward speculation any more than it rewards outright gambling. Gambling is punished by the tax code unless it is financial speculation that pretends to be investment in which case it is favored. Gambling winnings are taxed as ordinary income while gambling losses can only be offset against gambling wins and only in the year they occurred.
Buffet is correct that the very wealthy tend to be taxed at lower average (not marginal) tax rates than the semi wealthy and the middle class and with the possible exception of venture capitalists this lower taxation of most of the very wealthy feels wrong.
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The EU is not on the brink. It's economy is growing.
http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/een/019/news_en.htm
The EU's problem is two fold. One its financial system is not as well integrated as is that in the United States. The EU suffers because of its weak central government.
Let's look at the most recent crisis in Ireland. Irish banks got themselves in trouble with bad loans. The Irish government panicked and guarenteed all bank debt including all bond debt. (something not done in the US). As a result, capital started leaving other EU states in favor of Ireland. So Great Brittian, and Germany followed Ireland in guaranteeing all bank debt in order to keep capital in country.
Now Ireland has got it's weenie in vice because the banks the Irish government guarenteed have liabilities that far exceed the resources of the state to backup.
Look at the economies of the Nordic countries....much more socialist than the United States and with much higher tax rates. Those economies are flourishing. They do not suffer from banking issues.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/40249252
http://www.swedishwire.com/business/5543-all-nordic-banks-pass-stress-test
No it is called tax law. While it is true that these people have large philanthropic interests, you don't make money giving it away. You make money by earning most of it as capital gains verus earned income and paying NO tax (e.g. payroll taxes of 15.5 %) on earned income above 106k or any of a number of tax schemes in the book (e.g. master limited partnerships where no income tax is paid for a number of years). Tax law is full of tax breaks for the rich. You don't have to look far or long to find them.
Ah yes you can. While that is the mantra from the rich often repeated by conservatives and Tea Partiers, it has no basis in truth or history. In the post WWII period our debt problem was even higher than it is today and marginal tax rates for the rich were 94% versus the 35% today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php
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