Warren Buffett still lives in home he bought for $31,500 more than 60 years ago
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
He was a landlord who exploited the low paid by jacking up prices on run down housing, or was that Buffett?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2019/04/18/warren-buff...
Is this the same Warren Buffett whose railway refused to provide his train workers with sick leave despite the company reporting a net income of nearly 6 billion?
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1570088566411366405
The same train company that didn't meet safety standards and so recently ended up poisoning a whole town after a derailment?
https://www.thestreet.com/video/warren-buffetts-bnsf-railway...
The same Buffett that pays almost no tax? (& can you guess who has to pay the tax in his stead - the poors who are subsidising his private jet flights)
Evidently neither you nor the person you're arguing with actually knows much about this topic. It seems like you already have an extremely strong opinion on the man and are trying to back-fill it with "facts". Oh well.
One of the sources was anti-capitalist, but the journalists who wrote a a couple of those articles for business news sources undoubtedly were supporters of capitalism, and are likely to be know much more about the financial issues than most us do.
Although there are larger questions of whether anyone should be in a position to hoard so much wealth, what 'cost' that wealth comes at for the rest of us, and whether the accompanying power he exercises (even if indirectly) is good for society.
Those are larger philosophical and ethical queries, that do often come with strong opinions for good reason. Those on the right worry that regulating wealth may come with an affect on some other freedoms, those on the left worry that such wealth comes with a risk to the integrity of the democratic process and comes at a high societal cost.
Most of the defences of Buffett against this criticism have seemed to have been: "he is just a money geek who doesn't get into those details", "at least he is planning to give a lot of it away", and "you are in no position to judge him." I, like many others, do not feel he is beyond criticism or that those are sufficient answers.
I would send my tax money to a ditch if I can nowadays instead of giving to the government.
Are you really happier having a higher burden of taxation because of Buffett and others using these (albeit technically legal) means to avoid paying theirs - whether you like what the government does with those taxes or not?
> The same train company that didn't meet safety standards and so recently ended up poisoning a whole town after a derailment?
This way, other things in life become less relevant, which might explain his behavior. Basically, he’s living with a hacked reward function.
I was talking about inner motivations of people to explain their behavior.
if you believe this, capital investment does not make society better overall absent controls which insure income inequality cannot grow unchecked.
I’m not saying this is inarguably the truth, but if millions of people read “Capital in the 21st Century” then it’s at very least not a fringe idea, and one cannot simply dismiss criticism of investment as it exists in our economy.
If a monkey at a zoo hoarded all the bananas such that all the other monkeys there were starving, scientists would be examining that money down to a brain dissection to see just what was wrong with it.
Meanwhile, in human societies we have people who hoard so much wealth that they impoverish entire nations, and we put them on the covers of Forbes and Times magazines, and laud them as “pillars of the community” and “shrewd people to look up to”.
These people are parasites. We need to eliminate them to return wealth to the true creators of value - the workers and labourers.
Profit is the delta (difference) between the wages workers receive, and the price that the products of their labour garners on the open market.
Ergo, all profits are stolen wages. Or stolen labour, it’s all the same shite, different pile. The sale price of those products defines how much that labour is worth, but it’s the Parasite Class which divert a massive chunk of that value from ever getting back to the worker. In some industries like fast-food, workers receive less than 3¢ for every dollar of value they produce. That other 97¢/$ trickles upwards through greedy and obscenely overpaid people until it gets to those which have done practically no work at all - the C-suite and shareholders.
How is the C-suite executive not a valid worker, but when a blue-collar guy fills out the same paperwork and makes the same decisions, he's doing a productive and worthy work task?
Yes comrade, grab the sickle and hammer, we shall seize the means of paying ourselves everything that goes on necessary overheads normally.
We shall overpay for unskilled labour whom works on heavily automated fast food equipment, and let administration of an thousand-store international franchise be run by the worker who also fixes the ice-cream machine.
I must be even more frugal than the famously frugal, with my first class commercial flights.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2008/12/bailout-watch-254-...
What's more surprising to me is how well he's doing (physically and cognitively) in his 90's as someone who eats at McDonalds every single day and I think is largely sedentary. The other side of the coin is his dad barely made it to 60 though his mom died in her 90's.
The average BNSF worker makes $95,770 per year.