Warren Buffet is giving away $40 billion. He made that money in the last 40 years. Pulled himself up by his bootstraps, you might say. Unlike people who inherit wealth (e.g. Republicans voting to repeal the estate tax while they vote to not raise the minimum wage) Buffet is intelligent. If the Republican leaders of this country were able to understand the startling truth of this one statement from Buffett, this country would be
a very different place. Buffett:
In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.
He realizes that he got so rich in America BECAUSE it was America. He had the opportunity. And thus he is giving back his fortune. So very different from the current leaders of this country who, as its been said, "were born on third base and think they hit a triple". They feel that huge fortunes that flow from society are theirs to keep. "Fuck society" is their mantra. $5.15 an hour is all that society deserves. Buffett has also said that the US is going to turn into a sharecropper society. Believe him. It will if we don't change things. And that is exactly what Bush and all his "third baser" buddies want.