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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (743203)	6/21/2006 12:46:12 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

"you apparently will never tell us whether you believe the income tax to be 'immoral' as well" If you chose to read the posts and understand them rather than scanning for an angle to criticise them you would not write that. The Death Tax is just as moral as grave robbing. Do you keep your shovel in your car? </sarcasm>

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (743203)	6/26/2006 3:48:48 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Billionaire Boys Club "Warren Buffett, the chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., will give most of his $44 billion in Berkshire stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, entrusting his philanthropic legacy to the only person richer than him," Bloomberg reports. You can see why Buffett would want to give his billions to charity. The federal death tax is currently being phased out, but it will reappear in 2011 unless Congress acts--which means that if Buffett lives that long, the government will confiscate 55% of his assets upon his death. But wait. Buffett is, as a New York Sun editorial notes, "an avowed supporter of the estate tax." As we noted in 2001, so is Bill Gates Sr., the Microsoft founder's old man, who is an executive of the Bill and Melinda Foundation. As the Sun notes: Mr. Buffett could have let the government take its share of his estate after he dies. But just as Mr. Buffett has accumulated his vast wealth without paying much personal income tax, he has found a way to avoid the tax man in this maneuver as well, even writing in his letter to Bill and Melinda Gates that a condition of the gift is that the foundation "must continue to satisfy legal requirements qualifying my gifts as charitable and not subject to gift or other taxes." On the estate tax, watch what Mr. Buffett does, not what he says. The Gates Foundation isn't the only recipient of his largesse--three foundations headed by Mr. Buffett's three children, Susan, Howard, and Peter, will get hundreds of millions of dollars. Tax documents show that in 2004, Peter Buffett and his wife Jennifer each took a $40,000 a year salary for what they reported was 30 hours a week each of work on the foundation. When billionaires back the death tax, keep in mind that they have no intention of actually paying it. They are being "generous" with other people's money. This is the way in which the superrich wage class warfare against the merely affluent. opinionjournal.com