主题： Taxes

[Hedge fund operators] say they work hard, and in the process of working hard, they make other people money. And that’s true of a whole bunch of people in the world, but that doesn’t entitle them to a preferential tax rate.

Our leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my megarich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched. While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we megarich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.

If you eliminate the $20 billion or so raised by the estate tax, you’ve got to make the money up by taxing everybody else somehow. It’s amazing how the American population will fight for the families of those few thousand people who pay large estate taxes and for the whole rest of the country to pay for it out of their pockets.

Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother Charlie or me. Berkshire as a corporation, and we as individuals, have prospered in America as we would have in no other country. Indeed, if we lived in some other part of the world and completely escaped taxes, I’m sure we would be worse off financially (and in many other ways as well). Overall, we feel extraordinarily lucky to have been dealt a hand in life that enables us to write large checks to the government rather than one requiring the government to regularly write checks to us—say, because we are disabled or unemployed.

Let’s forget about the rich and ultrarich going on strike and stuffing their ample funds under their mattresses if—gasp—capital gains rates and ordinary income rates are increased. The ultrarich, including me, will forever pursue investment opportunities.

Forty percent of the revenue in the United States comes from payroll taxes, forty percent. My cleaning lady is being charged a payroll tax. Her payroll tax, counting the portion her employer pays, is higher than my capital gains tax.…I mean, I am treated like I am the bald eagle or something—that I have to be protected at all costs.

If you look at these 400 top incomes that have gone from $40 million on average per family up to $200 million, their tax rate has gone from 29 and a fraction down to 21 percent. So there’s been class warfare going on, it’s just that my class is winning. In fact my class isn’t just winning, we’re killing them. It’s been a rout!

This system works for the people involved. It works for the wealthy, it works for the special interests, it works for people in Congress and it works for the lobbyists. And it may not work for my cleaning lady, but, you know, what can she do about it?

If there’s a class war, you know, we’re the ones that are waging it, the rich. And our soldiers are the lobbyists. And the poor have a bunch of little toy soldiers. If the [Senate Republicans’ Better Care Reconciliation Act] bill … had been in effect this year … I would have saved $679,999, or over 17 percent of my tax bill. There’s nothing ambiguous about that. I will be given a 17 percent tax cut. And the people it’s directed at are couples with $250,000 or more of income. You could entitle this, you know, Relief for the Rich Act or something, because … I have got friends where it would have saved them as much as—it gets into the $10-million-and-up figure.

I think members of the Senate and the House get $174,000 a year. But … if you look at the disclosures, they have substantial other income. If they get to higher than $250,000, as a married couple, or $200,000 as a single person, they have given themselves a big, big tax cut, if they voted for this.