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On 12/18/10 8:08 PM, Stuart Munckton wrote: > From:<rock...@aol.com> > > > > The October 7 issue of *Forbes*, the magazine owned by Bono, featured a > mutually fawning conversation between billionaire investor Warren Buffet and > Jay Z. Buffet spoke animatedly about how he loves to get up every morning > because every morning he gets to do what he loves to do. > > What exactly is that? Buffet described it this way to the *New York > Times*: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class > that's making war and we're winning." > > Bono claims to be the champion of the world's poor. > > What's wrong with this picture? > Look, I think that Bono and Buffett are pretty bad but it is important for the left not to quote people out of context. Buffett said this in the context of favoring a return to a more progressive income tax, not in the spirit of "Atlas Shrugged". http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html Everybody's Business In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning By BEN STEIN Published: November 26, 2006 NOT long ago, I had the pleasure of a lengthy meeting with one of the smartest men on the planet, Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, in his unpretentious offices in Omaha. We talked of many things that, I hope, will inspire me for years to come. But one of the main subjects was taxes. Mr. Buffett, who probably does not feel sick when he sees his MasterCard bill in his mailbox the way I do, is at least as exercised about the tax system as I am. Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap. Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all. It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?” (clip) ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
