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“"If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from....You make a big election about small things," ” - Barack Obama 08/28/08Obama uttered these words just a few short years ago. It was supposedly a charge against politics as usual. Now, he is following the politics as usual playbook to a tee. And as he continues on his "anything but my record" tour he had the gall to say Ronald Reagan would be FOR the Buffet Rule: President Obama continued his push Wednesday to build support for the Buffett rule...

See: Obama takes 'Buffett Rule' on the road “The president believes in standing up for the middle class and making our tax system fairer, where everyone plays by the same set of rules, in order to ensure the economic security of the middle class,” the White House said in a release announcing the event at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. For those who are not familiar with the ``Buffett Rule``, it is a class warfare tax whose roots are found in the Marxist handbook, and is designed by conniving politicians to buy the votes of one economic class by...

What percent of all tax revenues do high-income households pay?   Income Tax All Federal Taxes Top 1% ($344,000 +) 39.5% 28.1% Top 5% ($155,000 +) 61% 44.3% Top 10% ($112,000 +) 72.7% 55% Lower Half ($32,000 -) 2.4% 2.6% Middle Quintile ($65,000) 4.6% 9.2% All Households 100% 100% What is the average tax rate paid by high-income households?   Income Tax All Federal Taxes Top 1% ($344,000 +) 19% 29.5% Top 5% ($155,000 +) 17.6% 27.9% Top 10% ($112,000 +) 16.2% 26.7% Lower Half ($32,000 -) 1.9% 9.6% Middle Quintile ($65,000) 3.3% 14.3% All Households 9.3% 20.4% IRS Statistics...

Well, ok, since this has been floating around for a week or so now, we can finally get to the truth: the Buffet Rule is really more about spreading the wealth around. Just not that much wealth, according to the CBO, so it’s more symbolic of where we intend to go from here. So anyway, the “Buffet Rule” was never about paying down the deficit? It was about making life “fair” all along? The goal, Mr. Furman explained, is to establish a "a basic issue of tax fairness." ... ...On another front: all hell’s broken loose again with one of...

April 1, 2012 Board of Directors Berkshire Hathaway Inc. 3555 Farnam Street, Suite 1440 Omaha, NE 68131 Dear Members of the Board... ..."Compensation: "We believe that the board has conveniently chosen to maintain the status quo and ignore these critical issues in order to preserve the directors’ generous board fees, .... As a result, the board has stood by idly as the stock price has lagged the general market during the past three months... Given the directors’ excessive board fees and lack of economic ownershipin the business, it is not surprising that the Berkshire board has fought for years to...

There goes the Buffett rule. Remember that political gambit, in which billionaire Warren Buffett pretended he was going to pay a much higher tax bill and President Obama pretended that raising rates on millionaires would make a dent in his hemorrhaging budget deficits? In one fell swoop Wednesday, Congress's tax scorekeeper punctured both phony claims. The analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation also showed less wealthy taxpayers why the Buffett ruse would eventually end up exposing them to higher taxes. With Mr. Buffett's help, Mr. Obama promoted the fairy tale that millionaires pay lower tax rates than their middle-class...

“The higher up in the tree the monkey goes, the more of his backside that shows,” goes the maxim. It would be hard to climb higher than Warren Buffett, the world's most celebrated investor. However, as the namesake of the Buffett Rule that imposes higher tax rates on the wealthy, Buffett and his backside dangle precariously “out on a limb.” Residing atop Buffett's tree is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, known to deliver the best rhetorical broadside, probably because of his broad backside. Last week, Christie buffeted Buffett, forcing him to Think Again. After two years of traumatic budget austerity,...

Warren Buffett's Greatest Fear: An Inevitable Nuclear, Chemical Or Biological Attack On The US Simone FoxmanFebuary 27, 2012In an hours-long interview with CNBC this morning, Warren Buffett admitted that his biggest fear for the U.S. economy is not growth, public debt, Europe, or any of the many threats that generally top economists' worry lists. It's actually a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. Even so, an American baby is probably the luckiest person in the world today. From the interview: CNBC's Becky Quick: Overall you are very optimistic about the future not only of this country but of the stock market....

VIDEO AT THE LINK "He should just write a check and shut up. Really. And just contribute. I'm tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he's got the ability to write a check. Go ahead and write it," Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) said to CNN's Piers Morgan.

Say goodbye to the much-loathed Alternative Minimum Tax and hello to the Buffett Rule. Sweet relief. The AMT has perplexed taxpayers and agonized accountants for decades. But wait: Are the AMT and the Buffett Rule really so different? The two take aim at different types of tax avoidance, so the details have little in common. But the headline is the same: Both were designed to make sure that wealthy citizens pay their fair share of income tax -- without creating a tax monster that somehow reaches down to regular people. When the AMT came into being in 1969, rich people...

Berkshire Hathaway chairman and famous investor Warren Buffett has dismissed gold as a "valueless asset". Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has dismissed gold as a valueless asset saying that it has no inherent value. In an article for Fortune magazine, Buffett said that gold investors were pinning their hopes on future demand. He warned that gold was a self-inflating bubble, created by investors desperate for a viable alternative to property and shares. The infamous investor warned that investors in gold would be left with egg on their face when the price eventually crashed. "Bubbles blown large enough inevitably pop," he said....

Gasparino actually said in plain English: 1. The 2008 Real Estate Bubble was caused in large part by the three ratings agencies 2. That Warren Buffet had ownership of Moody's and made millions at the time. 3. That the Lubrizol purchase was a continuation of a trend that Buffet has shown toward these sorts of ethical lapses in very large, economy moving transactions. So far, this is the very first time that anyone in the MSM has uttered such things, and the last place I thought I'd see it was on a Fox channel. Kudos to Gasparino for actually reporting...

Warren Buffet’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek, served as a stage prop for President Obama’s State of the Union speech. She was the President’s chief display of the alleged unfairness of our tax system – a little person paying a higher tax rate than her billionaire boss. Bosanek’s prominent role in Obama’s “fairness” campaign piqued my curiosity, and I imagine the curiosity of others. How much does her boss pay this downtrodden woman? So far, no one has volunteered this information. The IRS publishes detailed tax tables by income level. The latest results are for 2009. They show that taxpayers earning an...

People earning over $1 million per year should pay an effective tax rate of no less than 30 percent, President Obama said in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. The president laid down one of his most political markers of the annual policy speech by crafting what he called the "Buffett Rule," named after the famous billionaire investor. "Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes," Obama said.

When President Obama, who is normally a great proponent of “infrastructure” projects, made his bizarre decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline project, I wondered if he might have been induced to create those thousands of American jobs if the oil could be moved by his beloved high-speed rail. As it turns out, oil is already moved from northern latitudes, such as the booming oil fields of North Dakota, down to the Gulf of Mexico by rail of the old, low-speed variety. Fortunately, as Newt Gingrich pointed out during the Monday night Republican debate in Florida, the oil is on...

'Whatever people bring to us, we're ready to haul' (BLOOMBERG) — Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that stand to benefit from the Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit. With modest expansion, railroads can handle all new oil produced in western Canada through 2030, according to an analysis of the Keystone proposal by the U.S. State Department. “Whatever people bring to us, we’re ready to haul,” Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern, a unit of Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said in an...

Not since his minions handed out lab coats at a White House Obamacare rally has Barack Obama committed such a lame or electorate-insulting act of political theater. But it's just part of the class war he must wage if he's to get re-elected. Code word: fairness. Politico: Billionaire Warren Buffett's longtime secretary will be joining first lady Michelle Obama in her box at tonight's State of the Union, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer announced on Twitter. Debbie Bosanek, who has worked for Buffett for nearly two decades, has become a symbol in the White House's fight over the tax code...

Warren Buffett has written his first check to the U.S. Treasury since announcing his pledge to match Republican donations to pay down the national debt a week ago. Carol Loomis, Fortune's senior editor-at-large and long-time friend of Buffett's, reports that the Omaha investor received a letter from Congressman Scott Rigell of Virginia (pictured below). In it, Rigell details the $49,000 he had donated to Treasury in total in 2011 and 2012 and asks Buffett to match both (full letter is below). Buffett agreed (full letter below). Lest we raise your hopes that the national debt is over as an issue,...

Despite his advanced age, it appears Warren Buffett has never heard the admonition, “Practice what you preach.” And it seems that some of his apologists haven’t, either. As you may know, Buffett has long been urging the government to seize more money from the rich, with the rationale that they have an obligation to pay more. In response, many traditionalists have told him to put up or shut up: If he truly believes in what he says, there’s nothing stopping him from writing a check to Big Brother as large as his socialism-espousing mouth. And now Buffett has a response:...

Business mogul Warren Buffet is promising to match any donation Republican members make toward cutting the national deficit. And he upped the ante when it came to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), saying he would match the leader's donations three-to-one. His pledge comes after McConnell said that if Buffett is feeling guilty about not paying more in taxes, he should just send in a check. "With regard to his tax rate, if he’s feeling guilty about it, I think he should send in a check," McConnell said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in September.