What Warren Buffett Made (and Paid in Taxes) in 2010
By Jill Schlesinger | 12 October 2011
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett made $63 million and
paid $6.9 million in taxes. Why do we know this juicy fact? Because Buffett and
Representative Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) have been engaged in a war of the words and
it looks like Buffett has won this round.
Here’s the background: after Buffett penned the now-famous
New York Times op-ed (”Stop Coddling the Super-Rich“), in which he argued that
the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes, Huelskamp demanded that
Buffett release his tax returns to prove his thesis.
Buffett was happy to oblige. In a letter to the Congressman,
which he shared with CNNMoney, the Oracle of Omaha said that he would be
delighted to release his returns, as long as other ultra-rich Americans would
do the same. Short of that long-shot, he spelled out the numbers to make his
case:
My adjusted gross income (line 37) was $62,855,038, my taxable
income (line 43) was $39,814,784 and my federal income tax (line 60) was
$6,923,494. In addition, my payroll taxes were $15,300.
Buffett didn’t do the math for Huelskamp, but based on these
numbers, Buffett paid taxes totaling 17.4 percent of his $39.8 million in
taxable income, a level that is far lower than the average American who pays
something closer to 30-something percent. Buffett challenged Huelskamp to find
out the average tax paid by his co-workers, guessing that “it’s likely that a
very large percentage Senators and Representatives and their staffs, will be in
the 30’s as well. Contrast that to the 21.4% enjoyed in 2008 by the 400
highest-income Americans whose income averaged $227 million each.”
Buffett also pointed out that this elite group has seen
“their incomes quintuple since 1992 while their tax rate fell by more than
seven percentage points.”
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