Warren Buffet, Billionaire hypocrite

Greetings all, I was wondering, how many of you have ever heard of Warren Buffett? He is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and one of the richest people in the world. It’s estimated he’s worth around $50 billion dollars.

Buffett is admired by many people for his ability to make money. The founders of Google praised Buffett for his managerial worldview. ((Google founders pay homage)) Now you might think that means that Buffett believes in the Free Enterprise system. ((Free Enterprise, the Economy and Monetary Policy)) Nothing could be further from the truth.

Warren Buffett is a big supporter of what is known as “Crony Capitalism. ((What is Crony capitalism)) He firmly believes in government intervention in private industry, and uses his influence to enrich himself and his investors/clients. Since the biggest supporters of government intervention are Liberal, Progressive Democrats, (yes I’m repeating myself again), Buffett has generally backed Democrats. He was and is one of the biggest boosters of Obama. If you follow the news, you will see that Buffett is always talking with Obama. (Now put the tin foil away. I’m not saying they are conspiring)

Lately, Old Warren has been saying the tax rates are to low and that the government should jack them way up.. He recently penned an editorial in the New York Times, ((Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich)) saying that he has to much money and that the rich need to have it confiscated.

There’s just one problem. It seems that Warren doesn’t bother to pay the taxes he ALREADY OWES!!

Say what? The man who says he has to much money, and wants the government to tax it away isn’t paying his taxes?

It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course. There’s a good article on NewsMax on this little problem. From Newsmax.com:

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett triggered a major debate over taxes recently when he wrote in The New York Times that he should be paying more to the federal government. He called on Washington lawmakers to up tax rates on the rich.

But it turns out that Buffett’s own company, Berkshire Hathaway, has had every opportunity to pay more taxes over the last decade. Instead, it’s been mired in a protracted legal battle with the Internal Revenue Service over a bill that one analyst estimates may total $1 billion.

Yes, that’s right: while Warren Buffett complains that the rich aren’t paying their fair share his own company has been fighting tooth and nail to avoid paying a larger share.

There’s a word for people like Old Warren. That word is “Hypocrite.” Old Warren is a typical elitist. In his world, the rules apply to everyone else, but not to him. The Newsmax story quotes extensively from Americans for Limited Government who went through Berkshire Hathaway’s own Annual Report.

Using only publicly-available documents, a certified public accountant (CPA) detailed Berkshire Hathaway’s tax problems to ALG. AlG President Bill Wilson cites the company’s own 2010 annual report, which states at one point that “At December 31, 2010… net unrecognized tax benefits were $1,005 million”, or about $1 billion.”

$1 Billion dollars? Who does he think he is? Dr. Evil? If I owed just a few hundred dollars to the Imperial Torturers Internal Revenue Service I’d have a federal SWAT team crashing my door and terrorizing my household.

According to Newsmax:

That $1 billion represents about 0.2 percent of the company’s $372 billion in total assets, according to ALG.

As Wilson points out, “On one hand Buffett advocates for paying more taxes, but when it comes to his own company’s taxes, he has gone through great lengths to pay less. That’s rich.”

What a phony. Warren Buffett is a classic reason why this country is in so much trouble. He has used his wealth and influence to game the system. Now gaming the system has been going on as long as there’s been a United States. However, it’s really taken off since the Roosevelt administrations New Deal. ((Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal))

Apparently this isn’t the first time Old Warren and Berkshire Hathaway have fought it out with the IRS:

Wilson also points to a prior tax fight the company fought. “Apparently, this is not the first time that Berkshire Hathaway has tangled with the IRS. They fought a 14-year battle over the dividends received deduction. That case was just resolved in 2005,” Wilson reports..

“Although the prior case was settled in Buffett’s favor, it demonstrates a decades-long pattern of behavior by Buffett to minimize his taxes. That’s the important part of the story,” Wilson writes.

Oh please sir, tell us more. What else has the old hypocrite been up to?

And Buffett this week is at the center of another tax controversy, according to The Wall Street Journal. His recent decision to invest in Bank of America “represents another tax-avoidance triumph for the Berkshire chief executive,” the Journal wrote in an editorial Wednesday. ((I don’t have a link to that editorial. AW))

It turns out that U.S. corporations are subject to a top federal income tax rate of 35 percent, the second highest in the world. But Berkshire won’t pay anything close to that on their investment in BofA preferred shares.

While I don’t have a problem with people and corporations trying to minimize their tax liability, I do have a problem with people like Buffett saying taxes need to be massively hiked. You know Warren, you might have a bit more credibility if you PAID THE TAXES YOU ALREADY OWE!!

But wait! There’s more!

“With the exclusion for Mr. Buffett and his fellow shareholders, Berkshire will enjoy an effective tax rate of 14.175% on the $300 million in dividends it will receive each year from Bank of America,” the Journal reported.

The Newsmax article also quotes from an article written by John Hayward in Human Events:

On top of this tax bill, figure the value of the time IRS agents have invested trying to collect it – they don’t work cheap, and we pay their salaries – and the resources Buffett’s people have invested fighting back. All of which would have been saved if Buffett simply practiced what he preached, and willingly handed over his fortune to the brilliant and compassionate “leaders” he commands the rest of us to support without resistance.

Warren Buffet is no different from the other liars and frauds orbiting Barack Obama. His hypocrisy just runs billions of dollars deeper. When it comes to “shared sacrifice,” you do the sacrificing, and they do the sharing.

Warren Buffett is a complete fraud and a total hypocrite. I had thought about saving this posting for later and naming Buffett the Chump of the Week, but this is far beyond that. Warren Buffett is a classic example of the problems caused by a massive government no longer responsive to the will of the voters.

While I do not support any punitive actions against Buffett, (Unless he’s shown to have knowingly violated the law), I do want his plans to screw over America to fail spectacularly and Berkshire Hathaway to fail miserably. Yes, this will harm his investors, but if they’re paying attention, they will bail out of his funds.

That’s all for now.

~The Angry (and poverty stricken) Webmaster~

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