It’s sort of a touching response to a $1.2 trillion deficit, isn’t it? That somehow the American people will all send in checks and take care of it?
Warren Buffett mocks Gov. Christie’s ‘write a check and shut up’ remark.
Reblogged from brooklynmutt with 64 notes / Warren Buffett Chris Christie Politics Economy News
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
If you’re in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.
I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.
Berkshire Hathaway Will Acquire Lubrizol for About $9 Billion
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to buy Lubrizol Corp., the world’s largest producer of lubricant additives, for about $9 billion in the cash-flush investor’s second-biggest acquisition in the past five years.
Berkshire will pay $135 a share in cash, 28 percent more than Lubrizol’s closing price on March 11, Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire said in a statement today. The purchase includes an additional $700 million of net debt.
Buffett is using his almost $40 billion pile of cash to pursue bigger acquisitions after Berkshire generated about $1 billion in free cash flow a month last year and as interest rates near zero percent limited returns in fixed-income markets. The 80-year-old told investors last month that his “elephant gun has been reloaded, and my trigger finger is itchy.” The purchase is Buffett’s second-largest since 2006 after his agreement in 2009 to buy Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
