Olin wrote:
>> Cyrus Afzali wrote:
>>> On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:14:35 -0600, JCrowe
hotrats.org>
>>> wrote:>>>> While that may be true, the taxes paid by Warren Buffett dwarf
>>>> probably all of his employees combined. My own take is that everybody
>>>> should pay a much lower gross amount and a much lower tax rate. This
>>>> can only happen, though, if the government reins in it's overwhelming
>>>> urge to spend money without end.
>>> Not necessarily. Everything that's quoted is about his net worth; his
>>> annual compensation is actually quite small relative to his wealth and
>>> he tends not to exercise many stock option grants. While his net worth
>>> is $52 billion, his annual compensation is only around $100K. Also,
>>> Berkshire-owned companies employee tens of thousands.
>> So, if Warren Buffett pays 17.7%% on an AGI of $100K, then he's not
>> making an annual income much higher than his employees. I suspect that
>> his wealth consists of a lot more than stock options.....I suspect that
>> he has a lot of diversified assets including BH shares. So, other than
>> taxing capital gains, are you folks advocating taxing at even higher
>> rates the things rich people already own? Just curious.
>>
>
> Assuming his $100K "salary" is about the same as his secretary's... yeah,
> why should he pay a little over half what the secretary is paying?
My point is that neither one should be paying anything....
>
> As far as capital gains, that's already a done deal. El Shrub got that down
> to around 15 percent, which is LESS than half what the average $100K wage
> slave pays
It's a different kind of tax Olin....and the average "wage slave" as
you call them is only a wage slave because they are paying taxes in the
first place.
>
> Seeing as how both conservatives and more than a few libertarians have
> argued for flat taxes over the years at different times, it would surely
> seem the tables have turned entirely, with lower income folks paying a
> significantly higher percentage of their income to taxes.
Well, the trouble with the label libertarian is that anybody can call
themselves one and then go off making claims that a "flat tax" is fair.
By that definition Neil Boortz is a libertarian....even claims the
label. It makes about as much sense as calling Bush a conservative.
>
> Look, I understand the middle income people have always paid and will always
> pay a statistically larger share of the national tax burden. What concerns
> me now is that the worry over "soaking the rich" has left them with an even
> larger share of the pie and smaller share of the burden... especially when
> you consider the scare tatics used over the inheritance tax to bail out the
> Waltons a couple years back.
The inheritance tax is absolutely totally unethical, even by the
standards of the collectivists running this show. A person pays taxes
on his assets his entire life and then when he dies, the ferals claim
to own rights to what he had left over. Sort of flies in the face of
the approach of saving and taking responsibility for one's economic
actions.
>
> And, of course, that did not simply come from Bush and Company. The big lie
> convinced more than a few in Congress, never mind average families for whom
> the inheritance tax was NEVER gonna even be a minor issue.
It's not a minor issue...it's another example of the outright theft
by government that so many collectivists feel is justified.
>
> Neither was the change in capital gains, as the "profit" from the sale of
> the family farm is miniscule when compared to your CEO (like Fiorina(sp?) or
> the asswipe who helped to ruin our old parent company here) getting
> settlements that could buy and sell ten of those family farms several times
> over.
But that's a totally different issue, Olin. In the case of CEOs being
rewarded, it is done with assets of a "private" company, not by stealing
dollars from citizens. And while you keep making the point that these
CEOs are making many times what ordinary employees make, that too has
little relevance to the issue. Each individual employee has made a
decision to work for the agreed upon salary....and he or she is free
to quit. The owners of the company, e.g. the shareholders, are the only
ones who have a legitimate say in stopping such abuses.
>
> Never mind what one thinks of taxes, in general, as none of us particularly
> loves 'em, but when a billionaire steps up and says this ain't fair, it just
> might be time to take a listen.
Why does Buffett's theory of what's "right" carry any more weight
than any other nominally free individual. I suppose that the next
proposition is to advocate banning abortion because the pope is
an expert? The fact is that income tax is a form of slavery, which
many people seem to oppose when applied to individuals owned by
other individuals, but not when it's asserted as a legitimate
role of a government.
>
>
