On fair taxation, the Oracle of Omaha speaketh thus:
“ We don’t mind paying taxes at Berkshire…
And I would say with the present fiscal policies, I think that something has to give, and I think that higher taxes are quite likely, and if the government wants to take a greater share of your income, or mine, or Berkshire’s, they can do it. And they may decide that someday they don’t want the fiscal deficit to be this large, because that has some important consequences, and they may not want to decrease spending a lot, and they may decide they’ll take a larger percentage of what we earn and we’ll pay it. We always hope, at Berkshire, to pay substantial federal income taxes.
We think it’s appropriate that a company, a country that’s been as been as generous to our owners, it’s been the place… . I was lucky. Berkshire was lucky, was here. If we send in a check like we did last year, we sent in over $5 billion to the US federal government. And if 800 other companies had done the same thing, no other person in the United States would have had to pay a dime of federal taxes, whether income taxes, no Social Security taxes, no estate taxes, no… . It’s open down the line.
WEB makes most other CEOs look mauronish and childish trying to save on taxes to be greedy and often in the face of their own failings.
WEB has some heavy industry but is a financial. He knows those roots go back into the heavy industry of the US. Heavy industry may not like higher corporate taxes but to build factories here must face higher taxes.
The 500th largest company (roughly) in the USA had revenue of $5.99 billion. How would they pay $5 billion in taxes? And if the 500th largest couldn’t, where will you find 800 companies to do so?
You are to literal and do not understand what Buffet was saying. He was saying if company paid their fair share of taxes. You just need to be able to understand what Buffet really means.
Frankly I wish taxes on heavy industry were a good bit higher and they still paid less in taxes. Meaning they wrote off the costs of building more factories. Then factory workers would earn more and pay more in taxes.
We can skin a cat in more ways than one. My apologies to the cats.
Correct. The context is not the $5 billion but “done the same thing” - send a check to the government.
Just under 10% of the Fortune 500 companies - often the largest and most profitable, paid no taxes last year.
I am on record in favor of a much lower or even a zero corporate tax rate but until that happens, it is utterly nonsensical for a company, like Tesla for example, to have paid $0 in federal taxes last year.
Corporations are not the beneficiaries, they are just the middle-men. The beneficiaries are:
Shareholders
BoD
Management
Workers
Not necessarily in that order. The benefit of taxing corporations is centralized access, the disadvantage is corporate evasive power. Maybe VAT is the better alternative.
I prefer income tax over VAT. I feel like VAT likely has a larger downward pressure on economic activity than taxing income does - but that is certainly more hypothesis than theory.
Yup. Of course, many of those evasion tactics are written into the tax code. Corporations pay on their net. We Proles pay on gross income, before all the costs of staying alive are paid. Corporations can carry losses forward or backward, to cancel out profits. Proles simply pay, unless they have a loss on a stock. Even then, the loss they can deduct on a stock in one year is limited.
I wonder how many resources corporations waste in schemes to reduce their taxes?
Did you hear the POTUS yesterday, berating the PM of Ireland for how Ireland abuses the US by having a lower tax rate? Playing the “victim” card again.
Apple has been ordered to pay Ireland €13bn (£11bn; $14bn) in unpaid taxes by Europe’s top court, putting an end to an eight-year row. The European Commission accused Ireland of giving Apple illegal tax advantages in 2016, but Ireland has consistently argued against the need for the tax to be paid.
That Russell Vought would be the same “Christian nationalist” whack who is now head of OMB? Off hand, I would say the tariffs have “traumatized” a lot of JCs, who thought they were buying profit protection for themselves. I can hear Ford CEO Farley crying about his Mexican cars and Chinese parts being tariffed, without turning on the TV.
Steve…it’s the right thing to do, but done the wrong way
Actually WEB is too polite. He is not talking about the 500th company, but he is directly talking about tech companies, including his holding Apple. The tech companies that have spend 100’s of billions in buying back shares have not paid their fair share of taxes. They came up with variety of creative ways, and paid congress to make them legal.
While Trump is asking EU to pay their fair share for US military costs, but no one is asking the tech giants.
