Is there no honor or respect left at DU?? Throwing poor (and I use the term loosely) Warren Buffet on the grill.
DeSwiss (27,000 posts)
Keiser Report: Warren Buffett's Interest Rate Apartheid (E743)
- So the smiling curmudgeony Santa rosy cheeks, turns out to be the skeevy old slumlord, Mr. Potter after all......
Warren Buffett's mobile home empire preys on the poor
Billionaire profits at every step, from building to selling to high cost lending
Public Integrity & The Seattle Times
By Daniel Wagner Mike Baker
12:30 am, April 3, 2015 Updated: 8:57 pm, April 6, 2015
Kirk and Denise Pitts purchased their mobile home in 1997. They still owe more than $39,000 on the home and land, which were valued at $33,100 in 2013. Here, the Pitts and their son, Caine, stand in front of their home in Knoxville, Tennessee. Daniel Wagner/Center for Public Integrity
Editor's note: This is a joint investigation of The Center for Public Integrity and The Seattle Times.
Denise Pitts walked into the pawn shop not far from where she bought her mobile home in Knoxville, Tennessee, and offered up her wedding rings for $100. Her marriage wasn’t over, but her husband was battling cancer and, Pitts said, her mortgage company told her the only way to keep a roof over his head would be to sell everything else.
Across the country in Ephrata, Washington, Kirk and Patricia Ackley sat down to close on a new mobile home, only to learn that the annual interest on their loan would be 12.5 percent rather than the 7 percent they said they had been promised. They went ahead because they had spent $11,000, most of their savings, to dig a foundation.
And near Bug Tussle, Alabama, Carol Carroll has been paying down her home for more than a decade but still owes nearly 90 percent of the sale price — and more than twice what the home is worth.
The families’ dealers and lenders went by different names — Luv Homes, Clayton Homes, Vanderbilt, 21st Mortgage. Yet the disastrous loans that threaten them with homelessness or the loss of family land stem from a single company: Clayton Homes, the nation’s biggest homebuilder, which is controlled by its second-richest man — Warren Buffett.
MORE
Worth rowing over to take a peep.
http://upload.democraticunderground.com/1017258848Guess they would be even more upset if they saw this article.
Warren Buffett’s Nifty Tax Loophole
Warren Buffett has backed higher individual tax rates–while ensuring that his vast wealth in Berkshire Hathaway is almost immune.
by Morris Propp
April 11, 2015 12:21 a.m. ET
Warren Buffett is fond of saying his tax rate is lower than his secretary’s. He does not publicize his tax returns, but for the tax year 2010, he paid $6.9 million on taxable income of $39.8 million, according to partial disclosures he made in 2011.
What is astounding about those numbers is not the 17.3% tax rate, but that Buffett’s $39.8 million of taxable income is only about 0.05% of his reported net worth ($71 billion according to Forbes, which put him third on its list of the 400 wealthiest people in the world for 2015).
Proportionately, that’s like someone with an ever-expanding net worth, currently $10 million, reporting taxable income of only $5,000 and paying a federal tax bill of only $900.
So, how does he do it? Buffett’s principal holding is an economic interest of about 20% of Berkshire Hathaway, the huge conglomerate he has been building since the 1960s. It has a market value of about $350 billion. Berkshire hasn’t paid any cash dividends since 1967. Rather, the company accumulates its prodigious after-tax income ($19.9 billion in 2014) and cash flow ($32 billion in 2014) to get bigger by buying companies, lots of companies. Among its large recent acquisitions were Lubrizol, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, and a shared acquisition of H.J. Heinz.
The Berkshire Model is to buy companies rich in cash flow with histories of paying dividends, then cancel those dividends and retain the cash flow going forward for future acquisitions.
{snip fair use}
http://online.barrons.com/articles/warren-buffetts-nifty-tax-loophole-1428726092
(may require a subscription to access the page, try www.bugmenot.com or you can just get a hard copy at the local library )
The Oracle of Omaha ha has the last laugh on Democrats and DUmmies.
And speaking of Oracle's, one real asshole called Larry Ellison has been suck pumping the public for years but I suspect the DUmmies love him too.
