Why Warren Buffett's Secretary Deserves a Raise
"You miserable old coot! I'm walkin' if you don't pony up more money. You're sitting on $50 billion and I get $20 an hour!? WTF!?"
Speaking at a $4,600-a-seat fundraiser in New York for Senator Hillary Clinton, Buffett said “The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.”
Bravo.
He said that he was taxed at 17.7 percent on the $46 million he made last year (in actual income; doesn't include the value of his billions in Berkshire Hathaway stock), without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 percent. Buffett told his audience, which included John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, and Alan Patricof, the founder of the US branch of Apax Partners, that US government policy had accentuated a disparity of wealth that hurt the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation. As if they hadn't already noticed.
Buffett said that he was a Democrat -- KABOOM! -- because Republicans are more likely to think: “I’m making $80 million a year – God must have intended me to have a lower tax rate.”
He lashed out against a Republican proposal to eliminate elements of inheritance tax, which raises about $30 billion a year from the assets of about 12,000 rich families and added that the Republicans would seek to recover lost revenue by increasing taxes for the less prosperous. Ouch.
“You could take that $30 billion and give $1,000 to 30 million poor families," he said. "Or should you favor the 12,000 estates and make 30 million families pay an extra $1,000?”
When the man called the Oracle of Omaha, a guy regarded as the most successful investor in America, comes out against Republican tax policy, it does more than grab headlines; it makes people think.
KAPOW!
- June 28, 2007
Comments
Now you're talkin'...this is the kind of article I like to see on this site. Keep it up, Blue Steel!
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