This paragraph nails it!
Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother … 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.
Warren Buffet (again), quoted in Berkshire’s 1998 Annual Report
It sounds fine. I think corporations and big companies should pay ample tax.
But remember that old adage about “taxation without representation?� If you’re talking about the individual, our taxes are absurd. They are hidden everywhere, much of it in the form of usury by the Federal Reserve.
If only it were true, that the IRS was all we faced. Ladies and gentlemen, we also pay taxes at the gas pump – where we are paying for war without so much as a vote on it.
We pay taxes in the form as usury on every dollar bill, because the Treasury (funny name for a place with $8 trillion in debt) is under the hand of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is a PRIVATE CORPORATION, and there is nothing federal about it – the name is there simply to deceive people. We the people pay interest on every dollar printed, to the nine banks of the Federal Reserve – which, by the way, are mostly foreign banks, and the same ones the US went to war with in 1776. They now literally own our currency, and our people and our resources, by controlling the Federal Reserve. Read up on the monkeyshines happening in the name of money.
No harm intended, but US citizens are the most naïve and ill-educated electorate of perhaps any developed nation on matters of US currency, financial issues, global finance issues (yes, read “world government� vis a vis a cashless universal currency) (also read here) and debt. We are also being set up for a global economic fall.
Before you go thanking God for paying taxes, why not first count the ways?
I agree that it is refreshing when we hear powerful people like Warren Buffet speak with moral fortitude and are humble about their debt to this country. However, my question is where is the dissent of people like these in the last 5 years when extremists have ruled our country and endangered our democracy. I am in the middle of reading the latest book of Pres. Carter, “Our Endangered Values� and it is scary how the right wing “Christians� have hijacked Christianity. I was brought up as a Christian and my mother was devout, but the vitriol and diatribe from the right wing leaders is not what I am used to. My mother died 2 years ago and since that time, I have not been attending church because what I see there is a selfish and intolerant group of people who practice demagoguery. I pray that the Lord will not actually let us fall to the pits and leave America without moral values.
The problem is that the moral values that these “Christians� espouse is not the kind that Jesus Christ taught and that I learned growing up. I am afraid to speak with “Christians� because they get so intense and everybody else but them are evil. They tend to think I am not Christian enough because I do not ram my religion in people’s faces, but I respect all people.
We need influential people like Warren Buffet to articulate outrage at the growing problems of our country.
Excellent. Fresh wind to the Augean stables of Tax Ideology! Here speaks a person who proves that Bush-like radicalism discriminates against rich and poor alike, it only cripples us on different reaches of their personality, according to our size of the wallet. Warren Buffet refuses to be slighted by politics as Cipher W.B., one-number-among-millions personification of international Greed. You are great, Warren, please, please, keep on …