His effective tax percentage he meant. Since he has so many tax write-offs, capital gains distributions and carried interest, he was referring to the taxes he paid divided by the total money he earned. One can assume his secretary had only her income and the standard deduction.

That’s mostly irrelevant. If you had a trillion dollars in muni bonds and no other income, your federal tax rate would be zero. (And that’s a constitutional thing, too).

The other aspect is long term capital gains rate. Raising that has historically hurt capital formation, which, while it hurts those at the top, creates situations like the late 70’s for the rest of the population.

Buffett said that because he wants other to pay more tax. If he so wants to pay more tax as law requires it, then all he has to do is lobby Washington get rid of the “Dividend Received Deduction” or DRD, which he is the biggest beneficiary.

DRD is when a company, in this case Bershire Hathaway, received a dividend payment from a company they owned, Bershire can exempt up to 80% of the dividend from the income tax.

I love Buffett dearly and I think he is a great person. But when it come to tax, he is a hypocrite.