Warren Buffet on Bush Tax Cuts and "Trickle Down"Follow

That only applies to people with low incomes, as they don't have the ability to NOT spend the money (they need to live paycheck to paycheck, for example), whereas the rich don't necessarily spend all of the money they make.

Knew I could count on you to not get that, though.

Economy has done pretty poorly for most of 2010 with the Bush tax cuts. There are other factors as to why that happened, though. It's almost as if giving out tax cuts ISN'T the magic bullet that'll fix all of our economic problems. Also, the implication in your statement is that the economy would do worse if taxes were to ever go up, which is also completely false as well.



Edited, Dec 6th 2010 4:22pm by bsphil

Warren buffet's position on taxation is weird. Personally he uses every little break and loophole he can to get it as low as possible. Then he goes and complains that the rich are undertaxed. IMO Gregg Easterbrook is right on this... the rich who think that the rich are undertaxed should be the first in line to overpay their taxes. Yet none of them do. Obama is the same way. He made a couple of million from his books, complains the rich have it too easy, then makes sure he pays the least taxes possible.

So we have two examples of rich liberals with a do as I say not as I do mentality. When they personally start paying taxes at the rate they think that rich people should, they can talk, until then I think both of them should shut up and mind their own bloody business.

But at least they pay their taxes unlike some others in the democratic party. Frankly, despite what anyone says, my opinion of the left and the RINOs is that the key people in both those groups, the ones who call the shots, believe that only the elite few should have money and everyone else should be poor.

That's entirely moronic. Regardless of whether you believe Warren Buffet is right or wrong, his actions are perfectly consistent with his beliefs. Taxation cannot work on a voluntary basis. It's a prisoners' dilemma. Everyone has to contribute or it doesn't work. From Buffet's perspective, he is demonstrating how far he can exploit the system and then claims that we should fix these exploitations.

You don't design rules with loop holes and then hope no one uses them. You design rules that cannot be exploited--or are at least painfully annoying to do so.

It's just too bad those plants, machines for those plants, and all of the workers working on them are in China.

He's not trying to prove anything. He's a greedy b****** and that's all there is to it. He could lead by example and doing what he says. Instead the only example he's setting is how to be a 2 faced weasel.



That would require decency and common sense. It's lacking in both parties in washington so that'll never happen.

Edited, Dec 6th 2010 9:35pm by KingWinterclaw

Yes. Should they hire people that they don't need? I'm curious how you think that would work.



I'm quite certain the exact same arguments were made back when the internal combustion engine began to be mass produced and replaced horses (and all the people and space required to maintain them), and eliminated about 90% of the manual labor required to run farms, destroyed the wagon wheel industry, and otherwise rocked the economy to its core.

And I know that they said the exact same thing when automated systems began to replace human laborers in factories in the 60s. How on earth could we possibly manage if all those people currently employed assembling cars, radios, TVs, washing machines, and whatnot were replaced by machines that could do the job in half the time at half the cost? How could we ever survive?

And I'm sure the same was said when the first civilization realized that by planting seeds in the ground in rows, they could obtain sufficient food for their population with fewer of them having to actively hunt, fish, or gather the food themselves.


Amazingly, this seemingly insurmountable conundrum manages to work itself out every time. And in every single case, what happens is that the efficiency allows the labor force which is no longer required to do the last thing to come up with new things to do. Like building bridges, roads, nice clay pots, aqueducts, and other things. And each time, the increase in efficiency results in a jump in both technological advancement *and* over all standard of living for the citizens. The idea that those people will just be unable to survive and we'll all end out burdened with them is a complete myth. It's never been an automatic result of increased efficiency. The only time that has happened, in fact, is when people think it must and so they create social systems to help those poor people who are put out of work. When you don't do this, the results are much more positive.


You know. If we're to look at history as a guide anyway.



No. You let the companies that are saving half their costs while making the same products find new uses for the labor. Just like has happened every other time. Just a century and a half ago, somewhere around 80% of the entire US labor force worked in agriculture (growing food). Today, less than 3% do. Are the other 77% of the population sitting around doing nothing? Nope. They are doing other things that they couldn't do back when we needed 80% of the population to grow enough food for us all.


There is no crisis here. Stop acting like it.


And as to trickle down not working? Explain to me how a financial crisis which at its core consisted entirely of a bunch of super rich financial institutions and their investors (also most of them what you could call "rich") loosing a bunch of money. If the mere act of X amount of money floating around in the hands of the wealthy in the free market doesn't "trickle down" into jobs for working and middle class people, then why are we sitting at just below 10% unemployment right now?

We have just witnessed pretty definitive proof that said effects do indeed trickle down. That it's not obvious, or you can't figure out why doesn't change the fairly obvious fact that it does. Somehow because a bunch of bankers and investors lost money, a bunch of people lost their jobs, and a bunch of companies implemented hiring freezes, which combined to raise unemployment significantly. You can sit around and insist that those were unrelated, but then you're basically arguing that you have no clue why unemployment went up. It just happened, I guess. Yeah, stick your head in the sand.


Some of us *know* that the circulation of wealth results in increased employment, greater productivity, increased technological development, improved products and services, and better overall standard of living for all. We're not surprised that unemployment went up. We predicted that it would, for exactly the reasons we've been saying all along. Seeing it happen and *still* insisting that wealth effects don't trickle down is a pretty amazing amount of denial.



And for the record, it's not just about the top rates. It's also about the total amount of taxes collected. Looking at just one without considering the other only nets you part of the picture.

I meant charitable towards the government, not the government acting as a charity. It's silly to fund a government largely by donation. Whatever level of taxation you feel is appropriate, it needs to be mandatory and not optional.

Why the hell do you keep harping on small businesses? The only think you know about them is you work for one. You sure as hell don't own one.

The problem is they often don't, because investment means risk. But even when they do, particularly when they invest in their own business model, they already have a model-- they don't need a great deal of skilled labor to follow instructions and copy an existing model. The jobs created as a result of investment are mostly low-paying.

See, capitalism ensures competitively priced products and services, but not competitive pay. If you can provide a better overall product/service by paying employees LESS, which you almost always can, then you can beat out the competition that offers higher employee pay at the cost of a higher, less attractive price.

Pretty much what I said earlier, but whoever said that we were too efficient was right.



Yes, they should. They should hire more people to work less hours.

A simple move like changing the overtime definition nationwide to >30 hours/week would probably do a lot for job recovery.



Until it doesn't, and commerce for commerce's sake results in ecological and social problems while providing no real valuable service, but manages to thrive regardless based on the idiosyncrasies of human psychology.

So, it kind of already isn't working.



The nicest thing I can say about this is that it's not the dumbest thing you've ever said.

*You said a lot of other things that I'd probably have a response to, but I have other things to do and couldn't be ***** to read all that.

Edited, Dec 6th 2010 9:05pm by Kachi

I dont think who I am matters I just wanted to point out what I did.