Warren Dew wrote:Seth wrote:You know what his will says, do you? Last I heard, the estate tax goes back up to over 50 percent at the end of this year.
He's discussed it, yes. Very little if any of his estate will be taxed. A lot of it will be going to the nonprofits his children control.
So, now you have a problem with his children practicing philanthropy too?
Er, that 40 billion isn't his money, now is it?
Neither is my money after I give it to my pals. The difference is, my money gets taxed first.
Start a 501c3 non-profit charitable organization and you can do exactly the same thing Buffet is doing. You got a problem with charity?
Any person can donate to a non-profit and that income will not be taxed.
The average person cannot create a nonprofit that he or his children control,
Care to cite the provision of the IRS law that prohibits "average people" from starting tax-exempt charitable organizations? Don't look too hard, there isn't one. I know this because my sister, who almost certainly makes less than you do, started one herself, to send Catholic rosaries and letters of support to soldiers overseas. It costs next to nothing to create such a non-profit.
and use it to shelter his money while still using the money to further his own goals.
His "own goals" appear to be charitable giving and philanthropy. What's your problem with that? You seem to believe that the federal government has more of a right to determine how he spends his money than he does. Wrong. It's HIS MONEY. So long as he's using it for charitable purposes, it's not taxed. That's because the government recognizes that the benefits of individual charitable giving and tax-exempt charitable programs that serve society and particularly the poor are best funded by altruism, not government, and every dollar that individuals donate for such causes to private non-profits goes much farther than the same dollar taken by the federal government and then redistributed...after the government skims off it's share to support useless federal bureaucracy.
The overhead is too much for us.
What overhead? All my sister has to do is keep the books in order and file a tax return every year showing that she hasn't used the money improperly.
It's not too much for the Buffetts and Soroses of the world, though. In addition, their contributions aren't subject to the limits that ordinary peoples' charitable contributions are.
Really? Care to cite the provisions of the tax code that prove that assertion?
That Buffet has more to donate doesn't mean the law favors him, it means that society benefits far more from Buffets charity than from yours.
It's quite questionable whether society benefits from his charities at all.
Really? How so?
It certainly doesn't benefit from Soros' moveon.org charity; quite the opposite.
Leftists would disagree.
Just because tax law defines an organization as a charity doesn't mean that it actually does societally worthwhile work;
That's because neither you nor the government gets to decide what's "societally worthwhile work." The person donating the money gets to decide that.
people with enough money - the billionaires - can make appropriate political contributions to get the definitions tailored to their preferences.
How? What "definitions" are you referring to? Buffet operates under the same rules as my sister. They are broad rules that don't interfere with the charitable non-profit purposes for which the organization was established. Just because Buffet has enough money to fund organizations that fulfill his vision of societal good doesn't mean it's not a societal good. The person who donates money to a charitable organization decides what cause is societally worthwhile. This is as true of the donors to my sister's organization as it is for Buffet.
As has been pointed out many times, the "ultra-rich" like Buffet actually pay far more than their fair share of government revenues.
To the contrary, the evidence is only that the top 1% pay more than their fair share of government revenues. That's the ordinary rich, mere millionaires, orders of magnitude away from the ultra-rich billionaires like Buffett. I haven't seen any similar data on the top 0.001%.
So, what you're saying is that Occupy protesters are too stupid to realize that their actual enemy is government, which is the source of "crony capitalism" to begin with?
I am certainly saying that, yes. However, "crony capitalism" goes a little beyond direct government intervention. It also includes sweetheart deals negotiated by the major players that are not available to the average investor, like this one:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/290248- ... -t-tell-us
And what makes you think you're entitled to be included in such "sweetheart deals?" Capitalism is merely an economic theory that describes how free markets work, it's not a social system that dictates relationships between individuals. If you want to play in Warren Buffets league, then you need to prove that you have the chops to do so, keeping in mind that Buffet is the quintessential self-made man who started out as an investment salesman, and in 1950 had saved the princely sum of $9500, which he has since parlayed into his billions.
Why would you think that you have any right to be privy to the "sweetheart deals" that Buffet does, not having shown anywhere near the same savvy and drive he has exhibited all his life while building his fortune.
The true enemies of the occupation movement are certainly not most of the people in the top 1%. It's mostly the government, yes, but it's also the Soroses and Buffetts of the world that have undue influence with that government and are duping the movement into serving their own interests.
I won't argue about Soros, but what is Buffet's "undue influence" and what exactly has he done that's unlawful that serves his own interests...or are you merely complaining that your congresscritter pays more attention to the opinions of a self-made billionaire than those of a pundit on the Internet? Take that up with your congresscritter.
What? What are you talking about? How does Buffet's success impede "small to medium businesses" in their ability to prosper in the least?
It's not Buffett's success that does it, it's his use of tax dodges that mean he pays substantially lower tax rates than the average small businessman.
Without production, money is just numbers in a computer. If the current depression gets much worse, we're likely to see either hyperinflation or a revolution, either of which will make those numbers worthless.
Still, no matter how inflated the money supply, being wealthy is always better than being poor in a depression.
It didn't work out that way for most of the elite in the French revolution.
They made a fatal mistake: They didn't have enough guns and they didn't drop everything and run when they had the chance. Bad tactical planning.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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