Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Rich Individuals Should Pay More Taxes, But Wealthy Corporations Should Pay Less?

SAN FRANCISCO — Bill Gates Sr. — father of the co-founder of Microsoft who is the USA's richest man — is fighting to keep Bush from killing the estate tax that hits the super-rich but also some small-business owners and farmers. His son agrees with him, as do billionaires Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller Sr. and others.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - An Iowa Senate committee has approved a bill to grant tax breaks to Microsoft -- if the computer giant decides to put a project in Iowa.

As Taxing Tennessee points out, Bill Gates opposes eliminating the death tax but is quite happy to have local and state taxes eliminated for his company, Microsoft, which is holding more than $22 billion in cash, and made about $17 billion in profits last year.

3 Comments:

At 2/20/2008 8:12 PM, Blogger juandos said...

"Gates, 78, says the wealthy should pay the tax because they owe a special debt. Their riches, he says, would not be possible without a strong society supporting capitalism"...

Hmmm, doesn't the old geezer have it ass-backwards?

Aren't the works of the wealthy the reason that capitalism works as well as it does in this society?

Besides in this country the wealth creators get punished for their success by paying more than their fair share according to the CBO (take a good look at page 6)...

 
At 2/24/2008 2:50 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I note that Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett also favors retaining the estate tax.

When a firm is successful enough to make its founder very wealthy, but not successful enough to go public, it creates a serious estate-management problem: upon the founder's death the family must raise a very large amount of cash to pay the estate tax, but it has only one very large asset: the company.

In steps some entity with deep pockets: a large corporation. In fact Berkshire Hathaway itself is a serial purchaser of family-owned firms, with several of said firms identifying the estate tax as a major impetus to the sale.

And once the family firm is the property of a big public corporation, its management has no further concern about estate taxes.

Feudal Europe used the law of primogeniture to insure that control of wealth remained concentrated in the hands of just a few nobles. Today we use the estate tax to make sure that control of wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a few corporate boards - while its proponents falsely claim that it functions to spread control of wealth.

 
At 6/23/2008 2:09 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello.

Bill Gates established a foundation and Warren Buffett will put money into it -- both to avoid estate taxes.

It is a joke when these two say the estate tax is wonderful when they do all they can to avoid paying it.

 

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