Billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett said he advocated a tax hike only on what he termed the “ultra-rich,” making a distinction between his suggestion and President Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on millionaires.
“It isn’t [my idea] to have the rich pay more taxes. It’s to have the ultra-rich pay more,” he said on Bloomberg Television Friday.
“It’s to have the ultra-rich who are paying very low tax rates pay more taxes. There’s all kinds of ultra-rich who pay normal taxes, but there is a small segment — but you can find them very easily — who pay very low taxes, including me. People who make money with money only pay very low taxes at very high levels of income," Buffett said.
He continued: "What I’m talking about would probably apply to 50,000 people out of 310 million in the country. … It would simply mean that if you made tens of millions of dollars, and your tax rate was 16 or 17 percent, you would start paying like the person who made $100,000 or $10 million who paid normal tax rates.”
When pressed on his stance on Obama's proposal, Buffett said: “I have not looked at all the details of the [president’s jobs] plan."
But he also called Obama’s bill a “stimulus plan” and added that he doubted he would agree with all of it.
Read more about Buffett's view of the president's jobs and tax plans.
