7moore7

Dude, I am right there with ya.

This story is more funny than anything else, but pissed me off to no end at the waste of money and resources that is allowed.

A few years back my younger brother decides to pull a senior prank the last few weeks of class. Was gonna do it with friends, but they bailed so this is what he did:
He hid out in a classroom after school, waited for the janitor staff to clean and leave, and at around 11pm started his shenanegans. He microwaved 8 tubs of butter, put it in plastic bags and squeezed it all over the cafeteria floor. Wrote his class name on the window and had a good laugh walking back to the car. He was playing so wore ski goggles and such... long story short there was a theater maintenance person there who saw it happen, and called him in. Cops got him half a block from his car, yelling and telling him there were dogs around back. They were surprised to find his bag full of empty butter containers.

They brought him back to the school, questioned him, said they'd probably write him a ticket and have the school deal with it, but eventually had to cuff him and take him to county jail cause the theater guy was pressing charges (he slipped in the butter AFTER he saw my bro put it on the floor). At the county office they asked him how he got on the roof, to which he replied... "uh, I never was on the roof". They said that he may want to write his own version of the events. He spent the night in jail playing scrabble with a guy that said he'd been caught dealing coke again and was released to my more than nervous mother the next day. She was told that he had attempted injury on the theater person and caused extensive damages to the school. So far, just a funny story... there are more details but the general idea is that he put butter on the school floor. He said, "worst case scenario, I figured if I got caught, I'd have to do community service and pay for damages"

Here's where it gets messed up. The school pressed full felony charges on him to set an example. He had to visit court several times, get a lawyer (felony charges are no bueno), wasted huge amounts of taxpayers time and money in the system, cause there is no way to step back and say, "wait, this is an 18 year old who put butter on a school floor". Most people laughed when they read the story, but he still had to run the gauntlet, spending large amounts of the money he was saving for college just to save his own butt. He did $120 worth in damages, which mostly comprised of janitor pay. Now, 5 years later, he's trying to get a job as a teacher, and has to drive to the county office as well as the state office often to try to sort out this little word "felon" on his record. It's on there, charges dropped, but is still in the systems somehow. Kinda makes sense, cause you don't want to have shady teachers, but it should never have been on there in the first place. That's 5 hours away from where he lives, and if you knew my brother you would think that this is absolutely absurd. We should want teachers like him, and because there are so many steps and complicated, very inefficient people working the system, he may not get a job.

Which eventually led me to think: If this system had to compete with another system to stay alive, it would not have happened like this. If my brother had a choice between two different organizations who would process his felony charges, they would both have to appeal to him to keep his business. Because the waste of money (2 years dealing with it, and now 5 years later he's still taking up court time) I'm not in any way supportive of how things are run. It's a little off subject, and I'm not sure what I think about it all yet and haven't really made heads or tails of everything, but geeze man, from an overall perspective of this one situation, the kid should have cleaned up his mess, done community service and maybe written a letter of apology.

killer5280

Buffett's statements are a good example of pressure from above and below to implement an agenda. He is insulated from the consequences of his statements and he knows it, but that won't stop him from making grandstanding statements to help saddle ordinary people with more taxes.

Buffett has his head up his collectivist ***.

Old Yeller

Guys like Buffett don't make statements unless there is something that they can personally gain. I'm always suspicious.

steener

Gotta agree with Killer. Buffet is full of crap and has no intention of giving the government any more of his cash. The only thing that will change my mind is to see him on the news handing over a personal check to Obama. And no, I am not a liberal.

autoteach

So, you dont believe him because He hasnt handed over the money he thinks he should be paying prior to the law that would tell him to do so. I question this logic for many reasons, one of which is... have any of you tried to pay excess to your local government for any services? Also, I would like to be evaluated more often at my job, does that mean that I am full of ****? whatever...

Tweety

So, how many of the guys that question Buffet, have actually handed over their $10 check to their governement official of choiche? None?

So I guess you guys aren't that interested iin just handing money over without a reason... I think he's to an extent honest about it, he would pay it if it where taxed that way, and he would likely never feel the difference... Grandstanding or not, I think he actually wants the laws to change, and not in his favour... It seems he's smart enough to make himself a boatload of money, so he should be smart enough to know when the system is a complete failure...

KCar

This is a clip from Factcheck (link at bottom , plus another link to another article.) This can be spinned anyway...right... left, you just have to believe what you believe.

Who pays all of these taxes? The best information on that comes from the Congressional Budget Office, which has tracked the tax burden for many years. The most recent complete data cover 2007. CBO figured in that year more than half of all federal taxes was paid by the top 10 percent of income earners. They paid 55 percent of all federal taxes in 2007, CBO said.
That's a comprehensive figure, counting the income tax, payroll taxes, excise taxes and even the corporate income tax (borne by stockholders in the form of reduced dividends and appreciation). And perhaps surprisingly, the top 10 percent of earners pay a greater share of federal taxes now than they did before the Bush tax cuts, which Democrats constantly criticize as a giveaway to "the rich." The top 10 percent paid 50 percent of all federal taxes in 2001.
However, that comes in spite of lower tax rates at the top, not because of it. The reason the most affluent 10 percent pay a greater share of taxes is that they are getting a greater share of all income. Their share of all pre-tax income went from 37.5 percent in 2001 to 42 percent in 2007.
One figure that gets a lot of attention is the percentage of individuals and married couples who pay zero federal income taxes. Those figures come from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The TPC's most recent report was released June 14, and it shows that this year 46.4 percent of "tax units" (individuals or married couples) had zero federal income tax liability. That's because of various exemptions and tax credits aimed at reducing the income-tax burden on lower-income workers and families with children. The figure is down from 2008 and 2009, when the percentage topped out at 50.8 percent.
But practically all workers (and their employers) pay Medicare taxes on every dollar of wages, and Social Security taxes on every dollar of wages up to $106,800. Consequently, those who pay no federal income or payroll taxes at all amount to only 18.1 percent this year, the Tax Policy Center figures.
There's plenty more where these figures came from. We could focus more closely on what was paid and earned by the top 1 percent, for example. Or we could zoom in to examine the role of rising medical and drug costs in pushing up spending for Medicare and Medicaid. We may well visit those subjects in future articles. For now, we've tried to give a quick, accurate and balanced look at the big picture: Both where Washington spends, and where its money comes from.

Fiscal FactCheck | FactCheck.org


Guess Who Really Pays the Taxes — The American Magazine

autoteach

I dont know if factual mathematics can be "spun" either way. That is like saying that 2+2 can be spun to equal either 4 or 5.

Old Yeller

sure it can be spun. each side picks out the facts that help support their position most closely and don't bother to mention some of the other facts that balance the arguement. Just like I had a guy here at work complain about corporations not paying their fair share and used GE as an example. While his fact about GE is true, he didn't look at the entire corporate view and consider what they pay as a whole. Politicians always try to convince us that 2+2=5....both sides.

RCVTR

There's the bottom line. The government sets up a "department" or an "agency" or a "program". It gets funded, the money gets deposited, the people show up to sit at the desk in their cubicle. There is no incentive to perform. It all pays the same. The allocation is on the books and the money just keeps flowing in. To eliminate any part of it requires an act of congress. But congress is too busy getting funding for new departments, agencies and programs.

There is no way to pay for all of it and we still need to pay pensions for all of the former gov't employees, but we already spent that money. So let's cut funding for education...

No wait, lets prove how education is failing. We'll call it "The No Child Left Behind Act". We'll develop a program that makes it impossible for educators to succeed.

killer5280

No. Where did you come up with this idea? I don't want anyone, including grandstanding collectivists like Buffett, to pay one cent more in taxes to be squandered by our incompetent, corrupt and criminal government. I don't believe him because he personally, regardless of the law, will not be paying more taxes and he will not be affected by laws he helps to put around the necks of others. This is a guy who has made his fortune gaming the system. This is class warfare theater intended to drive an agenda.

L8RGYZ

Maybe I'm seeing it all wrong but it seems to me have a crazy system where some of the mega-rich people make big bucks by trading stocks. They buy low and sell high and are in a position where they can just skim the profits off the top and leave joe-citizen holding a smaller bag of cash.

I think it would work better and we would have a much less tenuous economy (& world) if people had to stay invested instead of constantly moving money from one place to the other. This system entails little risk when you're super-rich and zero comittment to the economy, the market or society.

L8RGYZ

Unfortunately this is what the President is talking about every time he talks about "job creation". I believe the government can probably do little to create jobs. But you can be assured he would like those job to all be government jobs rather than in the private sector.