Posted on 09/20/2011 10:41:34 AM PDT by Hunton Peck
WASHINGTON -- Billionaire investor Warren Buffett isn’t as undertaxed as he and President Obama seem to think.
***
Buffett actually was taxed twice on his investment income.
First, Buffett had to make the money he invested. Those earnings were taxed as corporate income, at about a 35-percent rate.
Then, Uncle Sam took another cut when Buffett invested the money and earned a profit. That’s when Buffett paid the 15 percent capital-gains tax rate.
All told, after combining corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, Buffett forked over about 45 percent of his earnings.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
(Not addressed: Even if Buffet weren't lying, why not tax his secretary less instead of taxing Buffet more?)
I’m tired of hearing about the anus of omaha.
At first, I thought you said “the anus of 0bama”.
But come to think of it, the anus in question does multitask.
THEY MAKE ME SO ANGRY.
You don’t expect Buffett to do as he says, do you? He is a lying hypocrite.
He could also pay himself a salary and be taxed at the same rate as his secretary if he is so damn worried about sending wasteful government more money (HE DOESN’T want to do that, he wants YOU to send more)!
******
The REAL Warren Buffett and the reason he wants YOU TO PAY MORE IN TAXES!!!
an insightful post, “Buffett’s Betrayal,” by Rolfe Winkler of Reuters, who at age 14 joined the Warren Buffett fan club. It describes how Berkshire Hathaway and the Sage of Omaha have cleaned up from the taxpayer funded bailout of companies it invests in. Here are a few crucial observations Winkler makes:
– Berkshire Hathaway, in which Buffett owns 27 percent, according to a recent proxy filing, has more than $26 billion invested in eight financial companies that have received bailout money. The TARP at one point had nearly $100 billion invested in these companies and, according to new data released by Thomson Reuters, FDIC backs more than $130 billion of their debt.
To put that in perspective, 75 percent of the debt these companies have issued since late November has come with a federal guarantee.
– [Buffett] even traded the bailout, seeking morally hazardous profits in preferred stock and warrants of Goldman and GE because he had “confidence in Congress to do the right thing” - to rescue shareholders in too-big-to-fail financials from the losses that were rightfully theirs to absorb.
Charles Munger, the billionaire vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., defended the US financial-company rescues of 2008 and told students that people in economic distress should “suck it in and cope.”
“You should thank God” for bank bailouts, Munger said in a discussion at the University of Michigan on Sept. 14, according to a video posted on the Internet. “Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.”
“Hit the economy with enough misery and enough disruption, destroy the currency, and God knows what happens,” Munger said. “So I think when you have troubles like that you shouldn’t be bitching about a little bailout. You should have been thinking it should have been bigger.”
Germany was unable to stabilize its financial system in the 1920s, and, Munger said, “We ended up with Adolf Hitler.”
One of the beneficiaries, of course, was billionaire Charles Munger. Middle class America was the loser.
“The Buffett Rule” = SCREW THE TAXPAYER’S for his benefit of bailouts to make billions more!
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Buffett’s Betrayal
Aug 4, 2009 13:54 EDT
Rolfe Winkler
When I was 14, Warren Buffett wrote me a letter.
It was a response to one I’d sent him, pitching an investment idea. For a kid interested in learning stocks, Buffett was a great role model. His investing style — diligent security analysis, finding competent management, patience — was immediately appealing.
Buffett was kind enough to respond to my letter, thanking me for it and inviting me to his company’s annual meeting. I was hooked. Today, Buffett remains famous for investing The Right Way. He even has a television cartoon in the works, which will groom the next generation of acolytes.
But it turns out much of the story is fiction. A good chunk of his fortune is dependent on taxpayer largess. Were it not for government bailouts, for which Buffett lobbied hard, many of his company’s stock holdings would have been wiped out.
Berkshire Hathaway, in which Buffett owns 27 percent, according to a recent proxy filing, has more than $26 billion invested in eight financial companies that have received bailout money. The TARP at one point had nearly $100 billion invested in these companies and, according to new data released by Thomson Reuters, FDIC backs more than $130 billion of their debt.
To put that in perspective, 75 percent of the debt these companies have issued since late November has come with a federal guarantee.
http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/2009/08/04/buffetts-betrayal/
Without FDIC’s debt guarantee program, even impregnable Goldman would have collapsed.
And this excludes the emergency, opaque lending facilities from the Federal Reserve that also helped rescue the big banks. Without all these bailouts, the financial system would have been forced to recapitalize itself.
Banks that couldn’t finance their balance sheets would have sold toxic assets at market prices, and the losses would have wiped out their shareholder’s equity. With $7 billion at stake, Buffett is one of the biggest of these shareholders.
Warren Buffett....the Tawana Brawley of Class Warfare!!!
Ponzi = Buffet
The Berkshire-Buffett Bailout
by: Ira Stoll July 23, 2010
The six companies that have not fully repaid their bailout funds are A.I.G, Citigroup, the CIT Group, M&T Bank, Regions Financial and SunTrust Banks.
The name that struck me there as interesting was M&T Bank (MTB). After all, at AIG, Citi (C), and CIT, managements have been ousted. But, according to Yahoo! Finance, as of March 31, 2010, the no. 2 institutional holder of M&T shares was Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, with 4.68% of the outstanding shares, worth $441,613,245 at the time.
The latest TARP transactions report shows a $151.5 million government capital injection into M&T Bank Corporation (Provident Bankshares Corporation/Baltimore) on November 14, 2008, and a $600 million government capital injection into M&T Bank Corporation (Buffalo) on December 23, 2008. Not a single dime of the $751.5 million total has been repaid.
When we’ve written here in the past about the government’s aid to Mr. Buffett, one of the world’s richest men, we’ve mentioned the high-speed rail stimulus money to the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad, and, in relation to his other holdings:
The taxpayer put $25 billion into Wells Fargo, $6.6 billion into U.S. Bancorp, and $3.38 billion into American Express through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Berkshire invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs on September 24, 2008; on October 28, 2008, Goldman agreed to take $10 billion in TARP money. Berkshire invested $3 billion in General Electric on October 1, 2008; on November 12, 2008, GE Capital announced it had received approval from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Temporary Liquidity Guaranty Program to issue up to $139 billion in debt backed by a government guaranty. Granted, Mr. Buffett claims Wells Fargo was forced to take the TARP money (a claim reinforced by other accounts) and that the TARP money hurt his interests by diluting him.
But until now we hadn’t noticed or mentioned the $751.5 million, still unpaid, in aid to M&T. It’s hard to articulate just how outrageous this is. Why should you or I be taxed to bail Warren Buffett out of a bad investment?
http://seekingalpha.com/article/216235-the-berkshire-buffett-bailout
So is his honesty.
When you lobby congress to make everyone play by certain rules, regulations and laws all the while trying to get an exemption for yourself seems to be Warren’s favorite pass time! Hell yes, he wants YOU to pay more taxes! He benefits!!!
Hey, Warren, why don’t YOU fire ALL of your lobbyists and play by the “BUFFETT RULE”, jackass!
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Barack Obama’s favorite capitalist, Warren Buffet, is seeking an exemption from Obama-endorsed derivatives rules for his insurance-and-everything conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway.
Derivatives are risk-shifting financial contracts that Buffet infamously described as “weapons of financial mass destruction.” After the 2008 financial crisis, Buffet decided to join the nuclear club and Berkshire has amassed a $63 billion derivatives portfolio.
Thanks for those links and insights (in posts 5 & 6). Buffett really should be twisting in the wind right next to al Gore and the other mega-fraudsters.
“Ponzi = Buffet”
Exactly!!!!
Buffet is an Obamamama sock puppet.
One of Buffet’s companies is FIGHTING the $1 BILLION+ it owes in taxes.
Should pay more in taxes my butt!!
In other words, Buffett is stealing cash from the taxpayers, and wants them to increase their payments so he can take even more.
You got it!
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