Warren Dew Wrote:Billionaires pay virtually no taxes. Warren Buffett pays an effective tax rate of less than one tenth of one percent. See this article from the WSJ for a numerical analysis:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405...1587258988
The idea that people rich enough to buy politicians would allow those politicians to charge them taxes is naive in the extreme.
The link you provided is paywalled. Here is one from Forbes:
http://fortune.com/2016/10/10/warren-buffett-taxes-trump/
It shows Buffet paid taxes:
Adjusted gross income: $11.6 million
Deductible charitable contributions: $3.5 million
Total deductions: $5.5 million
Federal income tax paid: $1.8 million
Buffet’s tax bill does amount to less than a tenth of percent of his net worth, but it is 30% of his his taxable income of 6.1 million. He simply earns a tiny income on all that wealth. The reason is simple. He is a billionaires because he owns scores of thousands of shares of Berkshire Hathaway A-class (BKA), a stock which in 1980 already sold for the high price of $275 a share, making Buffet worth tens of millions of dollars. BKA never splits and does not pay dividends. The entirely of any returns comes from future price appreciation. Today BKA sells foe 236K, making Buffet worth a thousand times more than he was in 1980, simply through price appreciation. As you must know, you don’t pay taxes on unrealized capital gains. Buffet lives rather modestly for a man of his wealth, and so takes a relatively small salary as CEO, and sells only a handful of shares each year. So his income is small. But he pays a pretty normal rate on the income he receives.
Trump, on the other hand, has claimed that his income in 2015 exceeded $557 million—though Fortune has pointed out that the presidential candidate appears to be confusing revenues with net income, and probably made closer to $177 million last year, before taxes, on which Fortune estimates that Trump paid a tax rate of 15%, or about $27 million.
If this estimate is remotely correct then Trump pays much more in taxes than Buffet. But Trump has intimated that he doesn't pay income taxes. Some have speculated that this is why he didn't release his returns.
Since his supporters appear to already believe that Trump pays no taxes and have no problem with that, then this cannot be the reason Trump refused to release the returns. The only conceivable secret he could be hiding is that he is not as rich as he claims to be and in fact is a failure as a businessman.
As president he stands to gain hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, which will soon correct this issue. Bush made his money from local government money and it appears that Trump plans to do the same, but on a far larger scale, with federal money.