> 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....
>
Good luck on that. Frankly, I'm with you, but I just don't see that ever
happening.
>
>> 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.
>
When stock options are used in lieu of actual salary, it's not only "the
same," it's a blatant use of lobbying efforts and the will of Congress to
circumvent the payment of taxes according to the codes. I'm certainly no
economist, but income deferred to stock options sure looks like income to
me.
>
>> 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.
>
Hey, I'm just telling you the arguments that have been made to me by folks
who claim to be various things.
Bush, of course, calls himself a "compassionate conservative," something
Goldberg took issue with... not so much Bush, but the "compassionate" part.
This conservative pundit called that, "compassionate conservativism" about
the scariest thing he'd ever heard of.
>
>> 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.
>
Of course it is. And, that's precisely why Texas made the FLOOR for
inheritance taxes something on the order of a million bucks several years
ago. It's the same in several other states, and has gone up some since then
in some places.
It is absolutely not an issue at all for the lion's share of Americans.
>
>> 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.
>
Joseph, when my mother passed away a few years back, she left a small
estate... probably about a hundred grand en toto. That was divided up
between my son and myself. Neither of us even drew the slightest interest
whatsoever from the State of Texas, the State of Tennessee OR Uncle Sugar.
No tax due on that inheritance at all. Not one single penny.
You seem so busy calling all who disagree with you "collectivists," that I'm
not sure you're paying attention to the issue at hand. When Shrub pushed
that that through, it was at the significant insistence of the Walton family
with an even more significant amount of lobbying money spent, so they could
have more than seventy five billion dollars left over after inheritance
taxes. When Shrub brought it up, it might, and I stress might, have affected
somewhere between two and five percent of Americans.
Now, if you want to argue that inheritance taxes should be done away with
entirely, I'm all right there with you, but that was NOT what Shrub was
arguing. He was arguing that the puny (by comparison) estate of us all was
in jeopardy from the tax man, when simply put, that was not and is not the
case.
>>
>> 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.
>
And more than a few shareholders are arguing that very thing. And no, it's
NOT the same thing. If it were, then bonuses would also be taxed as capital
gains, seeing as how they're not a normal part of your compensation? Ever
get one? Ever see it taxed at anything other than the going rate.
Sorry, but income is income is income is income, ad infinitum.
If I'm making $100 K, and you're the CEO, knocking down a million a year in
stock options, you damned well be paying something other than fifteen
percent to my thirty two percent withholding.
Again, we well might be in agreement on doing away with all taxes. I'd sure
like it a lot, but until I see some realistic hope of that ever happening, I
prefer to argue the rules we currently all allegedly live under.
>
>> 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.
>
It doesn't. It simply means that when somebody at the top publically claims
the system is unfair and shows how, that it merits something other than a
casual dismissal. That's all.
