Free Republic

Warren Buffett, who appreciated their shared experience as newspaper deliverers, once told her that fashion changes but the home remains far more secure. In apparel every celebrity with a Q rating above zero either had a line or was pitching one. But precious few celebrity licensors dabbled in home furnishings, even though the dynamics of buying a dresser are no different from buying a dress. "A known brand name gives people a comfort level when buying," says furniture industry analyst Wallace Epperson. In 1999 Ireland went to the biannual furniture convention in High Point, N.C. with a line of sofas,...

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....

Warren Buffett’s stake in Bank of America Corp. increased in value by $154 million after President Obama and the U.S. Justice Department announced a $25 billion foreclosure abuse settlement with the five largest U.S. banks Thursday, records show. Buffett invested $5 billion in Bank of America (B of A) on Aug. 25, 2011. As part of his investment deal, Buffett gained warrants that allow him to buy 700 million shares of Bank of America stock at a strike price of $7.14 a share. However, on Dec. 19, 2011, it was reported that Buffett was $1.5 billion underwater on his stock...

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...

Hypocrisy: As the great investor's secretary sat with the first lady at the State of the Union, the president spoke of economic "fairness." Is it fair to make a supporter wealthier at the expense of the American people? During the 2008 campaign, candidate Barack Obama cited billionaire Warren Buffett as one of his economic muses. In the 2012 State of the Union address Tuesday night, the president returned to his advocacy of the "Buffett rule," a proposed minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires. To highlight his theme of "fairness," there in the first lady's box sat Buffett's secretary, Debbie Bosanek,...

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...

The secretary for one of the world's wealthiest men and the wife of late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs are among those invited by the White House to attend the State of the Union address. The State of the Union guest list has become an annual rite, with the first lady's box taking on the sort of gravitas shown at the Academy Awards' Red Carpet ceremony. The guests often have ties to a proposal or initiative the president will outline in the address. Among this year's guests are Debbie Bosanek, the longtime secretary for billionaire Warren Buffett. Obama frequently cites Buffett's...

'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...

We'll leave it to others to assess the political fallout from Mitt Romney's statement yesterday that he paid about 15% in federal income taxes. But let's at least get some facts straight. On Morning Joe today, Joe Scarborough claimed that the revelations about Mitt Romney's taxes might be his Dukakis-in-the-tank moment. Scarborough repeated the shibboleth Warren Buffett put into circulation that at 15%, the super-rich like Romney pay a lower tax rate than secretaries. But is that so? Running the numbers suggest otherwise. See video and analysis here.

So just who are those top 1 percent of Americans that we're all supposed to hate? If you listen to President Obama, the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, and much of the media, it's obvious. They're either "trust-fund babies" who inherited their money, or greedy bankers and hedge-fund managers. Certainly, they haven't worked especially hard for their money. While the recession has thrown millions of Americans out of work, they've been getting even richer. Worse, they don't even pay their fair share in taxes: Millionaires and billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. In reality, each of...

Energy Policy: Killing the Keystone XL pipeline may help one of the world's richest men get richer. North Dakota's booming oil fields will now grow more dependent on a railroad the president's economic guru just bought. Stop us if you see a pattern here. About the time George Soros — Hungarian billionaire and key donor to leftist groups and the Democratic Party — invested heavily in the stock of the state-run Brazilian oil company Petrobras, President Obama was curbing U.S. offshore oil production and the U.S. Export-Import Bank announced a $2 billion loan to Petrobras to finance deep-water drilling off...

Crony capitalism is alive and well and occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The latest billionaire donor to cash in on his connections to President Obama is Warren Buffett, who now joins billionaire George “Solyndra” Kaiser and George “Petrobras” Soros in cashing in on Obama’s pay-to-play energy policy. Warren Buffett is about to make a pile of money off the Bakken Oil Shale in North Dakota the old-fashioned way with a monopoly worthy of Here is how it works, President Obama put the brakes on the Keystone Pipeline, which would have delivered oil from Canada. That delay means Burlington Northern Santa Fe...

In the wake of the $700 billion TARP bailout, Warren Buffett apparently shaped a plan to clean up toxic assets that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner later adopted–resulting in massive profits for Buffett.That’s the latest bombshell revelation from investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s sensational new book, Throw Them All Out. According to Schweizer, after the bailout bill’s passage, Warren Buffett sat down and wrote then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a four-page private letter laying out a plan to clean up the toxic assets plaguing numerous financial institutions. Buffett proposed something he called a “public-private partnership fund.” For every $10 billion...

Listening to an interview of Peter Schwiezer talking to Steve Bannon (Director of Palin's Undefeated movie)...There's a whole chapter in Peter's new book exposing Warren Buffet. Supposedly he is involved in insider trading. This chapter of Schweizer's book shows how his company got the sweetheart deal to invest in Goldman Sachs in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. One member of Congress even bought Berkshire stock the day before the deal was even announced....It was a racket!

Up to 40 million Chinese people still live in caves. That's more than the populations of Texas and Illinois, combined. In fairness, a fraction of these caves are apparently pretty nice, complete with electricity and well-compacted dirt floors. But that's grading on a curve because, well, they're still caves. Meanwhile, 21 million Chinese live below what the Communist Party calls the "absolute poverty" line. That sounds pretty good if you have in mind our poverty line, which is just under $11,000 per year for an individual and roughly $22,000 for a family of four. The absolute poverty rate in China...

Warren Buffett, the world’s third-richest man, would see his tax rate fall to 0.2 percent under Rick Perry’s “Cut, Balance, and Grow,” tax proposal, according to an analysis by a Center for American Progress economist. Buffett, worth about $39 billion, gets nearly all of his income from capital gains and dividends. Perry’s proposal would eliminate taxes on those sources of income. As such, said Seth Hanlon, director of fiscal reform for the Doing What Works Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Buffett’s tax rate based on his 2010 tax return would be “microscopic.” Hanlon’s organization is a...

President Obama’s proposed “Buffett Rule”-- which would force the wealthiest Americans to pay higher taxes to help cut the nation’s deficits -- has met its Republican match. Republican lawmakers have introduced their own “Buffett Rule” that would allow billionaire investors like Warren Buffett who say they’re not paying enough taxes to voluntarily give more money to the federal government. Under the legislation, authored by Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and Rep. John Scalise of Louisiana, taxpayers can donate at least a $1 to the Treasury fund for deficit reduction when they file their federal income tax returns starting next...

Tycoon Warren Buffett, headliner of last night’s fund-raiser for President Obama at the Four Seasons, reiterated his advice for a tax on “ultra-rich people who are paying very low tax rates.” But the message appeared to have limited appeal to donors expected to pay $10,000 a plate; the turnout was “disappointing,” according to one guest.

CNBC: "Are you happy that the way it is being described. Is the program that the White House has presented a million dollars and over your program? " Warren Buffett: "Well, the precise program which will -- I don't know what their program will be. My program would be on the very high incomes that are taxed very low. Not just high incomes. Somebody making $50 million a year playing baseball, his taxes won't change. Make $50 million a year appearing on television, his income won't change. But, if they make a lot of money and pay a very low...

CNBC: "Are you happy that the way it is being described. Is the program that the White House has presented a million dollars and over your program? " Warren Buffett: "Well, the precise program which will -- I don't know what their program will be. My program would be on the very high incomes that are taxed very low. Not just high incomes. Somebody making $50 million a year playing baseball, his taxes won't change. Make $50 million a year appearing on television, his income won't change. But, if they make a lot of money and pay a very low...

Buffett: My plan was not the 'Buffett Rule' By Alicia M. Cohn - 09/30/11 11:01 AM ET Billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett, who has become the face of President Obama's $447 billion jobs creation legislation, said Friday that he might not agree with everything in the bill. Obama has called for higher tax rates on millionaires as part of his proposed deficit-reduction plan. Obama’s proposed tax increase, called the “Buffett Rule” in a nod to Buffett’s call for higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans, would apply to those earning annual incomes of $1 million or more. However, Buffett said he...

Mayor Bloomberg Sunday slammed billionaire investor Warren Buffett's call for higher taxes on the super-rich, dismissing it as political theater. "The Buffett thing is just theatrics," Hizzoner said speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press." In August, Buffett - known as "The Oracle from Omaha" - said he forked over a little less than $7 million in taxes last year, which added up to roughly 17% of his income. That percentage was lower than the secretaries in his office, he pointed out. Bloomberg said Buffett's use of the figures was a bit of a smoke and mirrors game. "If Warren Buffett...

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett will help raise money for President Barack Obama's re-election effort at a $35,800-a-ticket fundraiser next month in Chicago, an Obama campaign official said on Wednesday. Buffett will attend the October 27 event at a private home on Chicago's North Shore that is expected to include major donors to Obama's 2008 presidential run. The Democratic president, who is not expected to attend, is running for re-election in 2012. Buffett, the legendary chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has landed in the center of a growing political battle over Obama's proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy by inspiring...

(Reuters) - Billionaire investor Warren Buffett will help raise money for President Barack Obama's re-election effort at a $35,800-a-ticket fundraiser next month in Chicago, an Obama campaign official said on Wednesday. Buffett will attend the October 27 event at a private home on Chicago's North Shore that is expected to include major donors to Obama's 2008 presidential run. The Democratic president, who is not expected to attend, is running for re-election in 2012. Buffett, the legendary chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has landed in the center of a growing political battle over Obama's proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy...

WASHINGTON -- Billionaire investor Warren Buffett isn’t as undertaxed as he and President Obama seem to think. *** Buffett actually was taxed twice on his investment income. First, Buffett had to make the money he invested. Those earnings were taxed as corporate income, at about a 35-percent rate. Then, Uncle Sam took another cut when Buffett invested the money and earned a profit. That’s when Buffett paid the 15 percent capital-gains tax rate. All told, after combining corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, Buffett forked over about 45 percent of his earnings.

The justification for President Obama's new proposed tax on the wealthy is wrong on the numbers. Despite the president's claims, millionaires don't pay lower tax rates than middle class workers. His proposed surcharge on capital gains and dividend taxes will raise already high tax rates on high income individuals and force even more investment outside the United States. The so-called "Buffett rule" is based on Warren Buffett's claim: "The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Well, folks, did you hear President Obama's... what was that? It was a teleprompter campaign speech in the Rose Garden. There was an audience there, but they didn't applaud until it was all over. I don't know what we're dealing with here. In terms of stability, this was bold, bald-face lying to the American people, compounded on top of lies I don't think I even saw during the Clinton years. This today was just very troublesome, worrisome. He raised more straw men in one stump speech -- and that's what this was, a campaign stump speech --...

The justification for President Obama's new proposed tax on the wealthy is wrong on the numbers. Despite the president's claims, millionaires don't pay lower tax rates than middle class workers. His proposed surcharge on capital gains and dividend taxes will raise already high tax rates on high income individuals and force even more investment outside the United States. The so-called "Buffett rule" is based on Warren Buffett's claim: "The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per...

So this is what it’s come to in America. Earwitness News reports that our Taxer-in-Chief is going to try again to tax the rich. As part of his deficit reduction plan,” reports the LA Times, “Obama on Monday will propose a new minimum tax rate for millionaires to ensure they pay an effective federal tax rate at least as high as that paid by middle-class earners, administration officials said.” "The president will call the new tax the ‘Buffett rule’ after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, an Obama supporter who has publicly complained that tax breaks allow him to pay a lower...

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials. With a special joint Congressional committee starting work to reach a bipartisan budget deal by late November, the proposal adds a new and populist feature to Mr. Obama’s effort to raise the political pressure on Republicans to agree to higher revenues from the wealthy in return for Democrats’ support of future cuts from Medicare and Medicaid. Mr....

In a much-talked about Aug. 14 op-ed in the New York Times, Warren Buffett exclaimed that politicians were coddling the super rich. From the flawed analysis, it appears that Buffett’s op-ed is politically motivated and not policy driven. Perhaps Mr. Buffett should reread his 12th principle in his 13 owner-related business principles in his “Annual Report.” The 12th principle suggests that candor be a major principle in all his dealings. First, he asserts that the top 400 earners in America paid effective tax rates of 29.2 percent on their income of $16.9 billion in 1992. Buffett then claims in 2008,...

C’mon, IRS. “Stop coddling the super rich.� Contrive to successfully extract the taxes they already owe.Mr. Buffett, I barely want to waste my breath on your blatant hypocrisy.And, Mainstream Media (by which I mean the NYT, which ran Buffett’s obnoxious op-ed in the first place), WHERE ARE YOU?From NewsMax: Billionaire investor Warren Buffett triggered a major debate over taxes recently when he wrote in The New York Times that he should be paying more to the federal government. He called on Washington lawmakers to up tax rates on the rich.But it turns out that Buffett’s own company, Berkshire Hathaway, has...

Typical of The Palm Beach Post, the newspaper ran an article recently by Laura Green on Warren Buffett’s continuing rant that his taxes are too low (“Warren Buffett pushes higher tax rates, but some doubt those would be right or beneficial”). Contrary to the headline, which sounds as though the writer would quote a number of people who disagree with Mr. Buffett, Green quotes a grand total of one local entrepreneur who thought she was “being penalized for working hard or succeeding." She also included a substantial rebuttal by a local CPA who thought higher tax rates would not keep...

Two weeks ago, when billionaire Warren Buffett called for higher taxes on rich people like him, the liberal media predictably gushed and fawned. Yet when Americans for Better Government revealed last week that Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway has been in an almost decade-long dispute with the IRS over how much taxes it owes, these same press members couldn't care less: According to Berkshire Hathaway’s own annual report — see Note 15 on pp. 54-56 — the company has been in a years-long dispute over its federal tax bills. According to the report, “We anticipate that we will resolve all adjustments...

The United States tax code is so backward that billionaire investor Warren Buffett pays only 17 percent in income taxes, a rate even lower than that of his secretary. Or so he claims. While I have great respect for Mr. Buffett, and while I agree that our tax code could benefit from major adjustments, Mr. Buffett's statement is misleading. And he knows it. Even worse, when Mr. Buffett implies that wealthier Americans are under-taxed, it gives public officials cover to pursue disastrous policies such as Maryland's failed millionaire's tax, and the pending sales tax on interstate Internet purchases known as...

Amid questions about Bank of America's credibility, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has invested $5 billion dollars into the nations biggest bank. The bank's stock has fallen 52% over the past year over concerns of it's mortgage problems and worries that it would have to sell large amounts of its stock. Bill O' Reilly and Laura Ingraham discuss the possible motives behind this investment.

Warren Buffett has swooped in to save the day, this time for Bank of America. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to invest $5 billion in Bank of America Corp. to help assure investors that the company will not go under. What's with all the recent do gooder deeds? Is this guy considering a run for president in 2012? Probably not. By investing and "bolstering confidence" in Bank of America, Buffett will be rewarded with a handsome $300 million annually. Maybe he can use some of that to donate to his "the rich deserve to be taxed" cause.Already stocks have...

The majority of economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics believe that the federal deficit should be reduced only or primarily through spending cuts. The survey out Monday found that 56 percent of the NABE members surveyed felt that way, while 37 percent said they favor equal parts spending cuts and tax increases. The remaining 7 percent believe it should be done only or mostly through tax increases. As for how to reduce the deficit, nearly 40 percent said the best way would be to contain Medicare and Medicaid costs. Nearly a quarter recommended overhauling the tax system...

Warren Buffett, the billionaire head of Berkshire Hathaway and third richest person in the world, has called repeatedly for increasing taxes on wealthy Americans to help reduce the nation’s deficit. So last week, GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann called on Buffett to put his money where his mouth is. “Mr. Buffett, write a big check today,” Bachmann said on the campaign trail. “There’s nothing you have to wait for.” Bachmann is right: Donations to the federal government can be dropped in mailboxes and sent to a West Virginia post office box, or they can be submitted online at http://www.pay.gov.

Warren Buffett was in the New York Times today bragging about his low effective tax rate and saying how he would like to be paying more. Fellow Forbes contributor Tim Worstall weighed in quibbling about Mr. Buffet not factoring in the corporate taxes on Berkshire Hathaway's earnings. I'm just a simple CPA, whose firm won't even let him sign audit reports anymore. (That's true of all tax partners here by the way. I don't take it personally). I don't want to quibble with a quibble but apparently economists have a hard time figuring out the incidence of the corporate income...

Billionaire Warren Buffett urged lawmakers to raise taxes on the country's super-rich to help cut the budget deficit, saying such a move will not hurt investments. "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice," The 80-year-old "Oracle of Omaha" wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times. Buffett, one of the world's richest men and chairman of conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc , said his federal tax bill last year was $6,938,744. "That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid...

Just after dawn, hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt appeared on CNBC as the token contrarian in the Titans of Groupthink series. After some pleasantries we hit the 6 minutes mark where the formerly trite narrative experienced a flash crash. In the most candid discussion of the truth in America, Steinhardt said that "we live in an inland sea of calm waters while surrounding us are turbulent, horrible places," to which everyone nodded soberly in agreement, unaware of what was coming next. "America seems almost as insular as it has in times past," He continued. "America is not the wonderful place...

<p>After Standard & Poor’s bit an appendage from the U.S.’s credit rating, the credit-rating firm is smelling blood in the water at Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.</p> <p>Berkshire, which make big chunks of money from its insurance and reinsurance businesses, is spared the loss of its AA+ rating for now. But S&P marked Berkshire’s outlook down to “negative” from stable.” UPDATE: Buffett told Fox Business Network he isn’t surprised about S&P’s move. S&P had telegraphed plans to knock down insurers if the U.S. were downgraded.</p>

America's most trusted investor, Warren Buffett roundly dismissed the S&P downgrade in comments to Fox Business. "I don't get it. In Omaha, the U.S. is still triple A. In fact, if there were a quadruple-A rating, I'd give the U.S. that." Berkshire's exposure to treasuries is significant, but he says he doesn't plan to sell. Buffett sounded no alarm bells about the downgrade, going so far as to say it wouldn't have much effect on the markets Monday. "If nothing else takes place, meaning, if all other variables hold and there isn't say, a new problem in Europe, it won't...

May 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Warren Buffett apparently thinks you can have too many customers. Several years ago, I went toe-to-toe with Buffett — and won. The occasion was the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. I had introduced a resolution designed to stop company funds from being spent on population control and abortion campaigns. Buffett, you see, was convinced that there were too many people on the planet and, as the company’s majority shareholder, he was using company money to try and reduce their number. Buffett is not a religious man, so I made the argument in economic terms that any...

Omaha, NE, May 5, 2011 (OperationRescue.org) — Thousands of shareholders who attended the annual stockholder’s meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, for Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway Corporation on Saturday, April 30, were surprised to be greeted by the pro-life Truth Truck and a group of pro-life activists. For almost fifty years, Warren Buffett has been one of the largest single benefactors of population control and abortion in the world, exceeded only by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, with whom he has in recent years joined forces. However, his connection to abortion is still not widely known. It was rainy, cold and windy when the...

Warren Buffett, the influential billionaire investor, has said that the earthquake and tsunami in Japan may have created a "buying opportunity." The 80-year-old American, who is dubbed the "Sage of Omaha", said that the devastation had not changed the "economic prospect" of Japan. He argued that the markets normally over-react in the wake of big disasters. Speaking in Daegu, South Korea, Mr Buffett said that the terrorists attacks on New York in 2001 "didn't change the future of the US or the economic prospect of the US." He said: "I feel exactly the same way after what's happened in Japan....

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has agreed to pay $9bn (£5.6bn) in cash for US chemicals maker Lubrizol, making good on a pledge that he was on the hunt for big acquisitions. Mr Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway company offered $135 a share for Lubrizol, which is based in Ohio but has factories in almost 20 countries. The company expanded into Britain in the 1930s in its first venture outside the US. The deal follows Mr Buffett's near-$30bn acquisition in late 2009 of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, one of America's biggest railroad companies. The decision also underlines the billionaire's appetite for buying American...

President Obama is lucky. It is not everyday that a President’s legislative priority, as Senator, becomes a reality because of a billionaire. But that’s what happened last month when famed investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett pledged $50 million to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to create a global nuclear fuel bank to ostensibly discourage nations from enriching their own uranium. In 2007, as a Senator, Obama introduced legislation that would create an international fuel bank and give the IAEA, an arm of the United Nations, $50 million taxpayer dollars to begin to fund it.