Warren Buffett on Taxes
When Obama said that 'even Warren Buffett was in favor' of a tax increase, I really wish that McCain had responded, "If Warren Buffett thinks his taxes are too low, he should mail a check to the treasury and leave the rest of us non-billionaires alone."
As I have said before, high marginal tax rates do not take half so much away from the wealthy as they prevent members of the middle class from rising above their station.
Exhibit 1: I spend four years building a business from zilch, receiving an average of $25k per year in compensation, and sell it for a million dollars. After four years of never knowing whether I might make nothing, I finally take a capital gain of $1m, which was taxed at 28% under Clinton, and another 5% by Mass., leaving me with a little over $650,000, or a little more than enough to buy a nice multi-family and a new car, and maybe tak a nice vacation. Not bad, but I probably could have done that by working a steady job for four years.
Exhibit 2: Prescott Felcher Starchcollar III has a trust fund of $20m remaining from the inheritance of Prescott Felcher Starchcollar Sr.'s father-in-law. The lazy trustee buys a CD, which after four years is worth $21m, which, after taxes, leaves Prescott with $20,650,000.
Mind you, I have no issue with Prescott's money, because in the real world, it's guys like him that invest in venture and angel funds, which eventually help guys like me go from turning $0 into $1m to turning millions into hundreds of millions or more. The lower the taxes on capital gains are, the more people want to invest rather than spend or hoard their money, and the more money VCs have sitting in their funds, the less guys like me have to give up to get some of it. And in the meantime, my current business is hiring, because we're growing, despite all the madness going on out there. A $3000 credit? Fuck that. It's noise.
When Obama said that 'even Warren Buffett was in favor' of a tax increase, I really wish that McCain had responded, "If Warren Buffett thinks his taxes are too low, he should mail a check to the treasury and leave the rest of us non-billionaires alone."
As I have said before, high marginal tax rates do not take half so much away from the wealthy as they prevent members of the middle class from rising above their station.
Exhibit 1: I spend four years building a business from zilch, receiving an average of $25k per year in compensation, and sell it for a million dollars. After four years of never knowing whether I might make nothing, I finally take a capital gain of $1m, which was taxed at 28% under Clinton, and another 5% by Mass., leaving me with a little over $650,000, or a little more than enough to buy a nice multi-family and a new car, and maybe tak a nice vacation. Not bad, but I probably could have done that by working a steady job for four years.
Exhibit 2: Prescott Felcher Starchcollar III has a trust fund of $20m remaining from the inheritance of Prescott Felcher Starchcollar Sr.'s father-in-law. The lazy trustee buys a CD, which after four years is worth $21m, which, after taxes, leaves Prescott with $20,650,000.
Mind you, I have no issue with Prescott's money, because in the real world, it's guys like him that invest in venture and angel funds, which eventually help guys like me go from turning $0 into $1m to turning millions into hundreds of millions or more. The lower the taxes on capital gains are, the more people want to invest rather than spend or hoard their money, and the more money VCs have sitting in their funds, the less guys like me have to give up to get some of it. And in the meantime, my current business is hiring, because we're growing, despite all the madness going on out there. A $3000 credit? Fuck that. It's noise.
posted by The Snob at
10:08 AM
1 Comments:
Yeah, but the $3000 bullshit is worse than noise. In the "great" state of Ohio I'm sure that it will be a boondoggle for ACORN-style money laundering. You watch; we'll be seeing "companies" whose "employees" are employed by 18 other firms. Of course, these people don't work at any of them, they sit around big screen rental televisions smoking crack and filling out false voter registrations. Meanwhile government hiring incentive check are flying in and not surprisingly, not one firm in the laundering scheme ever gets audited.
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