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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (78600)	8/27/2011 4:17:24 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 217786

TJ, I see your problem now. As with most human problems, it's ignorance and lack of understanding: < Buffett is ... human slug > Being from Mao's maelstrom and Hong Kong's taxless Utopia, you are unfamiliar with the kleptocratic Byzantine labyrinth of abstruse taxation MADness practised in the "free" world. Nobody, absolutely nobody, knows or understands tax law. It is Calvin Ball. People can inspect small parts of it and much of the case law surrounding a small part, but all law applies all the time and that is subject to interpretation by multiple levels of courts and courts in various jurisdictions and it is changed on a daily basis. Warren Buffett is dealing in vast amounts of investment in many different industries in many different places with an array of weapons of mass financial destruction. The tax people know it's complex and Warren can afford to hire lawyers to deal with the tax lawyers so it's a matter of fiddling through the rule books and coming to mutually agreeable processes. Warren being willing to have tax law changed to increase taxes on wealthy people has nothing to do with "Mr Buffett's company" which has to act in a fiduciary way on behalf of all shareholders. Companies are not the playthings of a particular individual. They are responsible to the boards for the shareholders' interests and to comply with reams of employment law too. <“The company has been short-changing the tax collection agency for much of the past decade. Mr. Buffett’s company has not fully settled its tax bills from 2002-2009. Yet he says he’d happily pay more. Except the IRS has apparently been asking him to pay more going on nine years.” > If the company has been "short-changing" the tax department it's just a matter of process to set it right. [it's not actually short change - short change is when somebody buys something with a big bank note, and is given not enough money back to cover the difference between the price of the purchased item and the bank note]. That expression is intended to suggest illegal thieving activity. What they should have said is "the company has been under-paying the tax deparment". If they were in the journalism business, they would write [to avoid being sued for defamation] "allegedly". In NZ, the tax department has not fully settled its tax bills with me from 2000 [11 years ago!!!] In this case, they owe me. That's just how the laws work out. I don't suggest they are criminal because they still owe me. They are complying with the law as determined by lawyers. They are of course criminal in the Cosmic sense that taxing with threats of violence to rob me and give it to their friends to torture children to death is evil. But they are not illegal [as far as I can determine]. Some people would argue that taxing Warren's company to fund bombing of weddings in Afghanistan is not exactly Cosmic goodness either. But that's another matter. Now that you understand better, you should be able to see how wrong you were. Recommendation - public apology for your Maoistic jealousy and tractor wheeling of Warren the Amazing. While at it, you could express due admiration for Big Ben and toss in some veneration for the venerable Uncle Al KBE. They have done and are doing sterling jobs of keeping the US$ as the world's pre-eminent money despite the hopes of the bare bum gold bug atavistic Aztecs and the marauding depredations of the maniacs in Washington who are spending US$ like drunks at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting who have fallen off the wagon pour booze. Mqurice