Hillary’s friends pay ‘hypothetical’ taxes
The Clintons and Obamas have no bigger supporter and friend than Warren Buffett, and while Hillary is quick to label Trump a tax cheat, he’s a rank amateur compared to folks that donate to her coffers.
Looking through Warren Buffett’s business’s tax return information reported in his 2015 annual report, we find out that while we the people pay taxes, Berkshire Hathaway (currently trading at $215,750 for just one share) pays “hypothetical” taxes.
First, let’s look at earnings before taxes for Berkshire Hathaway. Everybody knows that the Clinton compatriot is successful, so it’s no surprise that his company made a before tax profit in 2015 of just under $35 billion. On this money they recorded a current tax of $5.426 billion, or about 15%. The top corporate tax rate for 2015 was 39%, and Hillary wants to raise it even higher because that’s only fair.
Is it fair that her friends pay only 15%? I remember Buffett complaining that his secretary pays higher taxes than Mitt Romney. He didn’t mention that she pays substantially more than Buffett himself and his company.
It’s interesting that the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report sheds some light on how friends of Obama and Hillary cheat the system. Maybe Trump should pay attention. In 16 states, “[i]ncome tax expense is reconciled to hypothetical amounts computed at the federal statutory rate[.]” For Hillary’s friends, “hypothetical tax rate” is defined as the rate the little people pay. Warren Buffett then takes this hypothetical amount of about $12 billion and reduces it by credits and dividend deductions and non-taxable exchanges to get down to $10.532 billion. So they’ve already cheated the taxpayers out of almost $2 billion. It’s not called cheating when Hillary and her friends do it, but it is when Trump and his friends do it.
Next, they use undisclosed tax maneuvers to “cheat” the taxpayers out of another $5.106 billion in “deferred taxes,” leaving only $5.426 billion in current incurred taxes on the $34-billion profit. But it doesn’t stop there. Digging deeper, we find out that they paid only $4.535 billion in taxes during the year, and they seem to think they have another $643 million in refunds coming back.
This is starting to sound like a Ronco commercial: “But wait! There’s more!” Those deferred taxes happened not just in 2015. They’ve been happening for years. How much of our taxpayer money has been “deferred”?
$63,126,000,000!
Yes, that’s sixty-three billion dollars of taxpayer money that just one of Hillary’s supporters is holding on to.
But wait! There’s still more! Warren Buffett isn’t happy with 15% tax rates and $63 billion of cash in his pocket. He wants more and is fighting to keep what he has. Again from his own financial report:
We file income tax returns in the United States and in state, local and foreign jurisdictions. We are under examination by the taxing authorities in many of these jurisdictions. We have settled tax return liabilities with U.S. federal taxing authorities for years before 2010. The IRS continues to audit Berkshire’s consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2010 and 2011 tax years and has commenced an examination of the 2012 and 2013 tax years. We are also under audit or subject to audit with respect to income taxes in many state and foreign jurisdictions.
Like Trump, he is under audit all the way back to 2010.
Pay to play schemes aren’t limited to the Clinton Foundation. It’s interesting to note that Berkshire Hathaway bought Secretary of State John Kerry’s wife’s business for $23 billion recently. Hillary, apparently, isn’t the only Democrat to have timing coincidences involving major financial transactions and political appointments.
The Daily Caller has an article calling out other Clinton supporters avoiding literally trillions of dollars of taxes, but it doesn’t stop with the likes of Apple. Clinton and Obama’s friends don’t just pay hypothetical taxes; they play by hypothetical rules.
As for Trump’s billion-dollar tax scheme? Hillary’s friends like Warren Buffett call that walking around money.