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A Star Turn For The Buffett Rule Poster Lady
Debbie Bosanek, secretary to mega-investor Warren Buffett, had stayed out of the limelight despite being the poster lady for President Obama’s tax proposals, but she took a star turn last night as she sat with first lady Michelle Obama during the State of the Union Speech.
Bosanek, who has worked for Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway for 37 years and has been his secretary for 20, said before the speech that “I was so excited I couldn’t sleep last night.”
Buffett launched Bosanek’s rise to fame last August 11 when The New York Times published an opinion piece he wrote called “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” In the piece he stated that if the government wants to instill the concept of “shared sacrifice,” it should require that he pay a higher portion of his income as taxes than his employees at Berkshire Hathaway, including his secretary.
“What I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office,” he wrote. “Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.”
Bosanek’s Cinderella moment was brief. She planned to catch a crack-of-dawn flight this morning back to Omaha, where the low-key headquarters of Berkshire Hathaway are located.
4 Responses to “A Star Turn For The Buffett Rule Poster Lady”
Such a public forum for real tax change talk. Maybe even the lower income voters who support the Bush Tax cuts can even get a better picture for how it is screwing them in favor of the rich, while we are struggling with massive debt. The “job creators” have been milking the system for years now all under the guise of fairness. God bless Warren Buffet for his efforts to shed some light on this.
Gee if Buffett is so concerned about his secretary’s tax bracket, why doesn’t he do the following: ask her if he can cut her salary to zero, give her Berkshire stock currently paying a dividend equivalent to 130% of her lost salary.
She would of course forgo the portion of SS taxes and other deductions formerly paid for by her “employer” to the governments. Would she mind if the stock goes up in value, probably not and she can even sell some stock to help pay for her retirement/medical insurance expenses, at 15% if held for 366 days.
If the stock goes down in value any sales of stock might give her losses that could be used to offset some future taxes, and so on.
Will she go for this deal? Will Warren offer it to her and all the others he feels sorry for, who knows. Just askin.
BTW: I am terrible at tax matters, but I read that Buffett owns a lot of Berkshire stock, and that Berkshire has to pay a corporate tax to Uncle Sam, BEFORE it pays Warren a dividend. That means unless Berkshire is in a 0% tax bracket, that Warren’s tax bracket may actually be higher than stated, same for Romney.
Please don’t ask me for details, call Warren.
dd
Maybe she’s not that type of secretary.
Berkshire pays 29% corporate tax. What that has to do with Mr. Buffet’s tax on his income from the company, I don’t know since corporate taxes are passed on through cuts in labor not to the investors, though it’s not that simple either.
http://blog.american.com/2011/07/corporate-taxes-and-warren-buffett/
Corporations have to pay a salary to employees that fit within a range appropriate to the job. While they can issue bonuses as well, that salary needs to be in place just for that reason. So no, he can’t just cut her salary to zero and give her stock. The same applies to corporate officers. Berkshire is a C corp, and pays taxes on its profits. Those profits are taken from fees they make handling transactions for customers, and some for growth in the investments, not the entire value of stock increases that those investments made.
So, for a guy like Buffet who probably pays himself a salary around $1million or so, his real earnings come from the billions he has in stocks and their growth. When he sells those he gets income and he pays 15% on that only, assuming he sold for a profit. It has nothing to do with whatever the Berkshire Corp is paying for its taxes on its profits. For all I know depending on what fees it charges, the profits for Berkshire could be a fraction of the money Buffet himself gets every year from investment growth. I could do some research, but you get the point and whatever the numbers come out to be they don’t affect the point of this.