Warren the cheap Tom Smith

Which would Warren Buffet's secretary prefer -- being made the national poster girl for tax victimhood or being paid more than a measley $60K a year for being personal assistant to one of the richest guys in the world?  I guess the idea is she'll be happier if her boss pays more in taxes.  If I were she, I would say, Warren, why not pay me some more instead of paying a lot more to the government.  It would be cheaper for you to increase my salary times ten then to pay a couple of points more in income taxes.  But this evidently is not the way the enlightened think.  Somehow giving politicians more to play with is supposed to make Ms. Secretary feel better.

Comments

[james wilson]

The taxation rate for both Carnegie and his secretary in 1900 was zero. Of course, America at that time was a place without hope or the expectation of improvement.

[steve]

If she's being paid 'only' $60k a year, then it's because of some combination of (1) that's all her services are worth on the open market or (2) she settles for less than her market value due to some non-salary considerations. In either case, she's getting what she wants and deserves and why should any good conservative b***h to Buffett that he's not paying her enough?

[Dan Simon]

Aah, but paying his secretary more than $60k/year doesn't help him in the competition against other weathly people. Demanding a tax increase, on the other hand, helps him in two ways:

1) He gets to indulge in a very ostentatious form of conspicuous consumption. After all, merely challenging his fellow billionaires to join him in giving away his money to charity after death doesn't get nearly as many headlines as challenging them to join him in giving his money to the government during life.

2) He gets to put the squeeze on people who don't have as much money as he does. Tax Warren Buffet at a higher rate, and he's still incomparably wealthy. That's probably also true of every other actual billionaire, as well. But at some income/wealth level between $1 million/year and Buffett's income/wealth, the extra tax burden knocks you down a notch from Warren Buffett territory to the next rung down. Presto--less competition for Warren!

There's a reason that the current campaign against economic equality focuses on "the top 1 percent": opinion-makers, who are invariably in the top twenty-or-so percent, want to redirect the majority's resentment away from themselves, and merge it with their own seething envy for those substantially richer than themselves. And as it turns out, they have an ally in Warren Buffett--who looks down with disdain from above on the vast majority of the 1 percent whom they envy from below.

[Evi L. Bloggerlady]

http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/2012/01/crony-capitalism-it-is-good-to-be.html I thought someone determined that for her claimed tax rate she had to be making over $200,000? And if she is making $60,000 (not bad pay for Omaha, but less than I would think Warren Buffett's secretary would make) I am guessing she has some Berkshire Hathaway shares too.