Truth, Lies and In Between

…before he was for higher taxes.

Warren Buffet is a douche bag. He’s been wonking about the tax rate and how it should be low since 1963. Now Obama gives him a medal and he starts kissing Obama’s ass by espousing for higher taxes on the rich. Since he’s already a billionaire about 40 times over, that shit doesn’t hurt him, just the rest of America that would like to get there.
Raising taxes on the rich will not solve our deficit problem. In fact, if Buffett gave every penny he had, he couldn’t keep the government running for very  long.

Raising taxes will not fix the deficit problem. It’s never been a ‘revenue’ problem, it’s a spending problem, always has been.

Let’s explore:

Buffett’s Billions Can’t Buy Him Exemption From His Tax-Averse Past
By Daniel Shuchman

Having a net worth over $40 billion may command some authority and attention for one’s views on economics and taxation.  But it should not buy one an exemption from basic logic, intellectual integrity, or consistency.

Such seems to be case with Warren Buffett, who yet again took to the op/ed pages of the New York Times this week to call for higher taxes on citizens earning more than $500,000.  The idea that higher income people should pay more in taxes, whether born of a desire for greater progressivity and/or a desire to raise more revenue, is certainly a legitimate viewpoint.  However, any serious person espousing such an argument should be expected to address several basic questions:  What will the standard of fairness be?  How is it to be determined that any particular income group is paying its “fair share?”  And if taxes are to increase, whether to address the deficit or for “fairness,” what degree of negative impact on economic growth and investment is one willing to tolerate?  Regrettably, the recent presidential campaign featured much demagoguery but few answers.  Mr. Buffett is no more illuminating.

The so-called Oracle of Omaha begins by making the manifestly absurd assertion that tax rates do not influence investment behavior.  Astonishingly, Mr. Buffett claims that when he was a fund manager, “never did anyone mention taxes as a reason to forgo an investment opportunity….”  “Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination,” he derisively contends, do investors adjust their plans based on the prospects for taxation.  Such statements defy economic logic.  The amount and nature of taxation, whether of the income stream generated by a particular investment, or that levied on interim dividends or capital gains realized upon the disposition of an asset, must be among the many complex factors considered by any rational investor in assessing the relative merits of an investment opportunity.  If this proposition is not self-evident to you, you can go straight to the authority himself.

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