Free Republic

BILLIONAIRE KOCH TO BILLIONAIRE BUFFETT: Screw Your Call For Higher Taxes -- The Government Is Incompetent Henry Blodget Aug. 19, 2011, 7:10 PM Earlier this week, Warren Buffett called bs on the Republican meme that raising taxes on deca-millionaires and billionaires will clobber the economy. His argument was persuasive--because raising taxes on billionaires won't hurt the economy. Today, in a statement published at the National Review, another billionaire weighs in on the tax issue--Charles Koch. Koch doesn't dispute Buffett's contention that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary and that he could afford to pay a lot more....

Democratic politicians and liberal groups, including unions, often rail against corporate tax loopholes as unjustified raids on the public treasury – as they should. Loopholes are particularly troublesome during periods, such as this one, when state and local budgets are leaking red ink and basic public services are being slashed. But one multimillion-dollar loophole draws vocal support from those who usually oppose corporate tax breaks – one that happens to benefit a heavily unionized industry whose top executives are overwhelmingly Democrats and contribute lavishly to the party's candidates and causes. That would be Southern California's movie and television production community....

Warren Buffett, the third wealthiest man in the world with a net worth of about $80 billion, is demanding the U.S. government make the rich like him pay higher taxes and says they should no longer be protected like endangered “spotted owls.” In a New York Times op-ed on Monday, titled “Stop Coddling the Rich,” Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway’s chair and CEO, said he and his “mega-rich” friends have been spared the “shared sacrifice” the country’s leaders have asked for as the country veers toward a double-dip recession. “While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while...

Reacting to last night’s GOP presidential debate, the White House said today that the 2012 candidates proved themselves to be out of touch with Americans by saying they would refuse to accept tax increases as part of a debt deal. In Ames, Iowa last night the candidates were asked if they would refuse to accept a budget deal with a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. All eight presidential contenders raised their hands. “That’s clearly not where the American people are,” Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters today. “That basically puts these candidates in a position...

I'm going to tell you something that Barack Obama doesn't understand. And because he doesn't understand it, our country is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when we cannot afford to waste hundreds of millions of dollars. Time and again President Obama has told us how he intends to solve our health care problems: spend money on pilot programs and other experiments; find out what works and then go copy it. He's also repeatedly said the same thing about education. The only difference: in education we've already been following this approach with no success for 25 years....

In a federal race like the presidency, each donor can only give $2,500 per candidate. However, there's nothing stopping powerful 'bundlers' from collecting checks from their rich friends. President Obama is already taking advantage of these super - donors: billionaire Democrats including Penny Pritzker and Marc Benioff have already raised hundreds of thousands for the reelection campaign. Perry must be hoping his past billionaire donors will do the same. Per Texas state disclosure records:

After being trounced in 2010, Democrats, special interest groups, and liberal billionaires have begun assembling assets to rebound in 2012. The "House Majority PAC", a Democrat Super PAC, reported this week to have raised $800,000 in the two months from its inception to June 13, including the time leading up to May’s NY-26 special election where Democrat Kathy Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin. House Majority PAC attack ads in the final weeks prior to the election have been speculated to have had a key role in Hochul’s victory. Politico has reported that $325,000 of the $800,000 amassed by the House...

John McMonigle claims to be the world's number one real estate agent. With $2.5 billion in residential sales over the past six years, this 46-year-old realtor may well have been. And now he's declaring bankruptcy. According to the Orange County Register, McMonigle has amassed $50 million in debt, even after selling his luxurious Newport Beach condo, his car and personal effects. The Oklahoma native started small, arriving in California with only $73 in his pocket in 1989. But within four years he was grossing $100,000 a year. McMonigle's ascension through the ranks of top realtors reached dizzying heights during the...

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Swedish furnishings giant IKEA, has promised more transparency over the firm's business affairs, saying that it has nothing to hide after a slew of allegations in recent years. "We have nothing to hide. There is no pretension to hide anything. We are going to go through everything and show that we follow each country's laws and regulations," Ingvar Kamprad, the 85-year-old billionaire who founded IKEA in 1943, told the Expressen daily. "We will make ourselves more transparent," he said. Kamprad's comments came a few months after a documentary aired on Swedish public television, SVT, alleged...

SEATTLE — The loneliest man in this city may be the pear-shaped billionaire whose yacht occasionally glides across Lake Washington at dusk, heading for a big empty house filled with stuff to keep him distracted. On the surface, Paul Allen lives an enviable life.......Then there are the Koch brothers, David and Charles, who’ve given to cancer research and the arts, yes, but also pour millions into efforts to keep average workers from getting a fair shake, and against laws that protect clean water and air. They plan to spend millions more in next year’s election to support policies that ensure...

Since everybody seems to be coming up with plans on how to cope with the skyrocketing national debt, let me try my hand at it too. The liberals’ easy solution is just to increase taxes on “the rich.” But, if you do the math, there aren’t enough of “the rich” to cover the huge and record-breaking deficit. Trying to reduce the deficit by cutting spending runs into an old familiar counterattack. There will be all kinds of claims by politicians and sad stories in the media about how these cuts will cause the poor to go hungry, the sick to...

You could take every single dollar of wealth away from every single American billionaire — and you still wouldn’t pay down the federal deficit for 2011. It’s remarkable but yes, the combined wealth of America’s billionaires ($1.5 trillion) wouldn’t pay down the federal deficit ($1.65 trillion). In fact: The combined wealth of all of the wealthiest people in the world ($4.5 trillion) would only fund the deficit — not the entire budget but just the deficit — for less than three years. And that’s only if the deficit stays at its current level. And that’s only if you seize literally...

RACINE, Wis. (AP) -- A billionaire executive whose family has run SC Johnson for five generations was charged Thursday with having sexual contact with a now 15-year-old girl over the course of several years. Samuel Curtis Johnson III, who goes by Curt, faces a count of repeated sexual assault of a child. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Johnson, 55, is the former chairman of Sturtevant-based Diversey Inc., a cleaning-products company that was spun off from SC Johnson in the late 1990s. Privately held SC Johnson makes household products including Pledge,...

No one really knows how to measure such wealth as billionaires as the likes of Kamprad and Gates dispose of. Kamprad's ranked as number 11 by Forbes on their 2011 listing of the World's wealthiest persons, but after recent news of his hidden possessions in the tax haven of Lichtenstein, some experts rank Ingvar Kamprad as number one. In any case, I, being Swedish myself find it interesting that two of the 15 richest men on Earth are Swedish (although I'm not one of them myself) and that small Scandinavia has more of companies listed on the Forbes Global 2000...

Russian oligarchs are back with a bang, making Moscow the billionaire capital of the world. Profiting from a boom in commodities, the number of billionaires in Russia, most of whom built their empires during the country's anarchic 1990s, grew to 101 from 62 last year, Forbes said in its annual list of the world's richest people. Moscow is home to 79 of Russia's billionaires, more than any other city in the world. Russia accounts for a third of Europe's 300 billionaires, and 15 of the world's 100 richest people, more than all the other so-called BRIC countries combined (Brazil, Russia,...

Cancer Research Before Activism, Billionaire Conservative Donor SaysBy MICHAEL COOPER Published: March 4, 2011 CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — More than a thousand miles from the labor tumult in Wisconsin — where his name shows up on the signs of protesters and a liberal blogger impersonating him got through to the governor on the phone and said “gotta crush that union!” — the real David H. Koch was greeted rather more warmly here Friday when he officially opened a new cancer research institute bearing his name. **SNIP** “It’s a case of identity theft,” Mr. Koch said of the call in which the...

Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, considered one of the wealthiest people in the world, controls the company through a secret foundation worth 100 billion kronor ($15.34 billion), according to a Sveriges Television (SVT) report. Despite the revelation, the company and Kamprad's image will probably not be affected, according to media advisors. Kamprad controls the enterprise through a holding company called Inter Ikea by way of a secret foundation in Liechtenstein. The foundation is currently worth about 100 billion kronor, according to the latest episode of SVT's Uppdrag granskning investigative news programme, set to air on Wednesday evening. Ikea is controlled through...

Much has been written about the oil and gas billionaire Koch brothers and their multimillion-dollar donations to right-wing causes. Charles and David Koch’s combined $43 billion wealth has made them virtually unstoppable this election cycle; even prolific left-wing philanthropist George Soros recently said he was powerless against the “avalanche” of donations from conservative billionaires like the Kochs. However, in recent days a handful of liberal billionaires have decided to take on the Kochs in one of the most hotly contested battles this election season: Proposition 23, the California ballot that may well prove a bellwether for the future of energy...

Are three liberal billionaires trying to control what we think of as news in America? Hedge fund billionaire George Soros, the sugar daddy of the Democratic Party, has given NPR an initial grant of $1.8 million dollars to begin a project called Impact of Government that will allow NPR to hire 100 journalists at NPR member stations in all 50 states. The focus will be covering state governments and how their actions affect people. The New York Times reports the response of Vivian Schiller, NPR's president and chief executive: Ms. Schiller said the journalists would not be part of typical...

Liberals love their billionaires, a very long and sometimes radical list that includes Barack Obama's special favorites Warren Buffet and George Soros. Warren Buffet provides economic advice to his goofy novice, and then has to watch our over-rated chief executive herald that a non-existent metric - the profit-to-earnings ratio - had reached levels that cried out to all those sitting on the sidelines to jump back into the stock market.