This article is part of an ongoing series of excerpts and insights from the recent biography The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business Life by Alice Schroeder. I encourage you to buy this book to get the full story.
“Paul Newman, Bill Gates, Sr., George Soros, a smattering of Rockefellers, and nearly two hundred other rich and influential people agreed and signed a petition published in the New York times that opposed Bush’s plan to eliminate the estate tax. Buffett didn’t join the petition because he thought it did not go far enough.
"He thought rich people were lucky and blessed and they should pay taxes.
"Repealing the estate tax would be like choosing the nation’s Olympic team from the children of past Olympic champions. Wealth is just a bunch of claim checks on the activities of others in the future. You can use your wealth in any way you want to. You can cash it in or give it away. But, the idea of passing wealth from generation to generation so that hundreds of your descendants can command the resources of other people simply because they came from the right womb flies in the face of a meritocratic society.
"I’d have higher tax at the higher levels of wealth. I wouldn’t mind having not tax up to a point and then a hundred percent tax for an estate over a hundred and fifty million dollars.
"The most important thing is to ask ‘And then what/’ if you eliminate the twenty billion dollars or so raised by the estate tax, you’ve got to make the money up by taxing everybody else somehow.
"I don’t like anything where the bottom twenty percent keep getting a poorer and poorer deal.”
This article is part of series. To read the other articles in the series, please click the links below:
- Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 9 of a series)
- Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 8 of a series)
- Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 7 of a series)
- Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 6 of a series)
- Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 4 of a series)
- Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 3 of a series)
- Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 2 of a series)
- Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (part 1 of a series)
Permanent Link: Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 5 of a series)
http://majorgiftsguru.com/2009/07/mega-donor-values-warren-buffett-part-5.html
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