Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder letter 2022 [pdf]
berkshirehathaway.com
berkshirehathaway.com
"The $32 trillion of revenue was garnered by the Treasury through individual income taxes (48%), social security and related receipts (34 1⁄2%), corporate income tax payments (8 1⁄2%) and a wide variety of lesser levies. Berkshire’s contribution via the corporate income tax was $32 billion during the decade, almost exactly a tenth of 1% of all money that the Treasury collected. 8
And that means – brace yourself – had there been roughly 1,000 taxpayers in the U.S. matching Berkshire’s payments, no other businesses nor any of the country’s 131 million households would have needed to pay any taxes to the federal government. Not a dime."
What if the market goes down? Well, I just wait for it to go back up again. I can easily afford to wait, my margin of safety is huge. Since the margin loan is for 2 million, and I need a 50% margin of safety by law, then the portfolio value would need to decline to 2 million (98% decline) before my loan gets called.
Taking the tax money as corporate tax means they end up paying the same percentage, without Moneybags’ CPA leveraging shell companies and loopholes to avoid tax than Schmoe pays.
If anything he might be suggesting in the letter that corporations aren't paying their fair share relative to the common man.
A lot of us would prefer if the federal government actually did allocate some more of its funds to maintaining the roads and infrastructure that we have; that would be a great start.
With a collective, co-op, employee owned, or government run industry - one can edict the various rates and ratios.
Look at the US energy company “eversource.”
Posting huge profits in an industry directly related to life and health and yet, doubled one of its rates this year. DOUBLED. Why? “Fuel costs”.
Fuel costs which have fallen.
With a gov run electric system, people will game based on votes. Not shareholder ROI.
Plus, people have a very “interesting” history when they disagree with a gov. From protest to removal of heads from bodies...
It’s not as simple when corporations are involved.
They are more evil than any of history’s evil men.
Higher fees, higher prices, whatever lever you can pull.
He understands how finance works, and he understands how compound interest rates work; he got the benefit of "low interest rates" on taxes and generated a lot of wealth; if he increases taxes for upstarts and himself, the upstarts are harmed more, since he has the legacy wealth from the historical discount.
Aristocrats made the laws favor themselves, and since they already owned all the land and wealth, no one was going to challenge them inside the legal framework.
There is a tendency, once you make your own fortune, to get political influence and make laws that make it harder for others to do the same thing. Change the rules of the game so you can't fall. Lobbying is a key business skill these days.
I’m sure there are many other examples but that’s generally how I understand it. I don’t intend for my example to reflect any specific event in the past, if that matters (ie. “I made it up”). Hope that helps.
The benign form of virtue signalling is something like publicly mourning for a while after your spouse dies so other people understand you aren't a sociopath. The runaway form of it is jumping on your spouse's funeral pyre because it shows you are more devoted than anyone else. Or in this case burning up your company's profits on unnecessary taxpaying to show you are wealthy/socialist enough to do that.
One entity contributing more voluntarily does essentially nothing. All it does is give a free victory to competitors.
IMO it is fine to express opinions and advocate positions even without contributing financially. I’m interested in why that’s a problem.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2022ltr.pdf
I'm an American in my early 30s. My impression is that within my lifetime, the self-criticism and self-doubt has increased a lot. Does this accord with the perspective of older Americans? I remember my dad (in his 60s) said that the pre-Watergate times really were quite different in terms of the trust that Americans had in their government. But he didn't give me a sense of the overall trend over the past few decades.
It does feel to me like we've reached the zone of diminishing returns to negativity. For example, if America now was like the America I grew up in, I feel like we would make at least a token effort to figure out what went wrong with the CDC's response to the pandemic and how the agency could do better next time, through some sort of blue ribbon commission. But it feels like the pandemic (and everything else) has become hopelessly partisan in a way that interferes with constructive change.
In 58 years, they outperformed the S&P500 39 times. That is 67% of the time, which according to R comes down to a p value of 0.01:
binom.test(x=39, n=58, p=.5)
=> p-value = 0.01193