Open Letter to Warren Buffett from a Prison Rape Survivor and Another Century
Originally Published on forbes.com on August 25th, 2011 ______________________________________ I asked my friend Tom Cahill to comment on the current discussion...
Did Warren Buffett Leave $675,000 of Tax Savings on the Table ?
This piece is really about tax planning, not Warren Buffett. When you have very charitable clients, you sometimes get odd results like this. Run the numbers. Don’t do them in your head. Test your assumptions. It’s not just charitable clients it’s anybody whose return has more than a couple of moving parts. Another planning principle is not letting the tail wag the dog. There may be compelling non-tax reasons for Mr. Buffett to be making, apparently only gifts of appreciated property rather than a combination of appreciated property and cash. Those reasons might be beyond my understanding. I had that skeletal return though. I just had to try. It’s how I was trained.
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Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.