Buffet pays lower taxes than his maid
This is precisely why Mike Gravel wants to abolish income tax and replace it with a progressive sales tax on goods - because the rich, for the most part, don't work!!!
Therefore, they pay no income tax!!!
They're taxed on their capital gains at a much lower rate than working class folks are taxed on their labor!
So, not only are bankers and moneychangers allowed to make obscene amounts of money effortlessly through speculating and creating money from thin air and lending it at interest, but they're allowed to keep all that ill-gotten profit because our tax system is blatantly rigged in their favor.
It's a scam!
Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.Speaking at a $4,600-a-seat fundraiser in New York for Senator Hillary Clinton, Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52 billion (£26 billion), 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 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”
Mr Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent. Mr 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.
The comments are among the most signficant yet in a debate raging on both sides of the Atlantic about growing income inequality and how the super-wealthy are taxed.
They echo those made this month by Nicholas Ferguson, one of the leading figures in Britain’s private equity industry, when he criticised tax rates that left its multimillionaire venture capitalists “paying less tax than a cleaning lady”.
Last week senior members of the US Senate proposed to increase the rate of tax that private equity and hedge fund staff pay on their share of the profits, known as carried interest, from the 15 per cent capital gains rate to about 35 per cent.
It will never happen as long as lobbyists reign in Congress.
Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, acknowledged in an interview yesterday that there were justified concerns about the huge profits generated by private equity firms and that he worried that income inequality was “poisoning democracy”.
When someone from Goldman Sachs says something like that about our democracy, you can bet that it's far beyond redemption.
He also said that he would be voting for the Democrat candidate at the next election. Mr Blankfein is the highest-paid executive on Wall Street, earning $54 million last year.
Mr Buffett, who runs the investment group Berkshire Hathaway and is widely regarded as the world’s most successful investor, said that he was a Democrat 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.”
Mr Buffett said that 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, would broaden the disparity between rich and poor. He added that the Republicans would seek to recover lost revenue by increasing taxes for the less prosperous.
He said: “You could take that $30 billion and give $1,000 to 30 million poor families. Or should you favour the 12,000 estates and make 30 million families pay an extra $1,000?”
There is no doubt that our tax system needs an overhaul.
But, to look only at our tax system without addressing the root cause of our economic woes - allowing a cartel of private bankers to control all of our money AND WHERE IT GOES - would be like treating the symptoms without curing the disease.
...especially for the ultra-wealthy American like Warren Buffett.
Warren have said something that the snooty and ecocentric rich people would prefer the facts be kept under wraps. The very rich like to rape, plunder and pillage America (not just the third world through the predatory lending practices at IMF and World Bank) to pursue further accumulation of wealth to raise their status "to the heaven" and bragging rights who's richer than another on annual Fortune Richest People list.
These people are not only selfish and avaricious to the extreme but they are sociopaths in intentionally creating the crisis -- the gap between the rich and poor to widen further and farther until the middle class disappear altogether, making it easy for the wealthy to impose their rules.
Aristocracy is alive and well. It's not an antiquated word at all. Aristocracy is comprised of oligarchy, plutocracy and autocracy that control the sectors of the government and manage the economy to tilt to their favor while leaving everyone not of the status of wealth & prestige behind in debt or impoverished or both.
While laissez-faire capitalism as advocated by the libertarians and republicans (I'm a registered Libertarian) and objectivists (Ayn Rand followers, notably Alan Greenspan) may be the best of infinite money-making worlds, it also lead to exploitation that create socialpolitical strife leading to the revolutionary acts. Look what happened to late 18th century France and Czarist Russia.
I don't believe in Communism. It does not work and it's as bad as Fascism, the latter Mussolini clarify "Corporatism".
America, as it stand now in law and society of the wealthy controlling the financial, military-industrial and government, is a corporatist fascist nation. It's no longer a democracy. There is verifiable proof some elections have been rigged to "select" the desired candidates (e-voting) by the elite insiders to assure the control for particular designs. Bush/Cheney '04 in the disputed Ohio election and the re-election of ardent Zionist Jew Joseph Lieberman last year.
There are two solutions. Either elect Ron Paul or Mike Gravel as president and force the institution of radical change to abolish the unfair laws favoring the financiers and wealthy in tax and preferential treatment or Second Revolution will rise if the Elites don't have the power to crush the opposition through oppressive laws and withholding of vital resources essential to the survival of the citizens (food & water, ammunition, oil) who wake up to the truth and foment the revolutionary acts in rapid progress.
Samuel Adams, father of the American Revolution, knew it -- he referred to "false and designing men" controlling the nation using totalitarian methods under the disguise of a democratic republic. So did his true patriot peers -- Hamilton (father of post-Revolution American capitalist system), Adams and Jefferson included.
The exploitative bankers and financiers and corrupt statesmen (almost always the Republican Party members) who favor only the rich contrary to the just service of the people as well as representation of the constituency that elected the politicians in the first place do not care for the misery of the financially disadvantaged people as they count the money derived from exploiting the loopholes in the flawed or corrupted laws, bribery, usury and outright fraud. This is why they are sociopaths and are capable of perpetrating violence by police state and military warfare abroad and in civil wars to consolidate the corporatist power.
Quotes -
"I am concerned for the security of our great nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insideous forces working from within."
General Douglas MacArthur
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952.
"Fifty men have run America, and that's a high figure."
Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK & RFK, in the July 26th, l936 issue of The New York Times.
"Today the path of total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government - a bureaucratic elite."
Senator William Jenner, 1954
"The case for government by elites is irrefutable..."
Senator William Fulbright, Former chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated at a 1963 symposium entitled "The Elite and the Electorate - Is Government by the People Possible?" (not a hoax, it's real)
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My blog Last Throes of US Empire
I think a certain amount of retrospectivity must be introduced into business and tax rules in order to transform the world into a pleasant place to be.
The way things are, the money-grubbing principle dictates the quantity and quality of economic activity. People will go well out of their way, and spend a lot of money they otherwise wouldn't have, in order to avoid a little tax. The tax break is the chief principle by which the infinite growth economy organises itself. But if people, and corporations, knew that no matter what they did they would at the end of the year pay a certain not-insignificant amount of tax, they would focus more on doing what they wanted to do, not on doing what the "smart money" was doing.
Because with retrospectivity, there would no longer be any smart money. There would be no point to participating in an kind of tax minimisation scheme - because you would be taxed no matter what you did with our money.
This idea sounds silly and unworkable, doesn't it?!
Enjoyed the blog!
Thanks!