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Jolinl
2021-06-15
Wow nice
Warren Buffett and the Myth of the ‘Good Billionaire’<blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特和“优秀亿万富翁”的神话</blockquote>
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Photograph via Getty\nWarren Buffett appears to be the safest kin","content":"<p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/002912ff5cccdf9eee5a5197b6b82e93\" tg-width=\"1600\" tg-height=\"1600\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"><span>Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph via Getty</span></p><p><blockquote><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><span>《纽约时报》插图；照片来自盖蒂</span></p></blockquote></p><p> Warren Buffett appears to be the safest kind of billionaire: the good kind. Mr. Buffett is neither Zuckerbergian messiah nor Musky provocateur, neither Bezosist space cadet nor Sacklerian undertaker. He is, or seems to be, quiet, humble, indifferent to money, philanthropic and critical of the system that allowed him to rise. Years ago, a proposed tax increase was named after him.</p><p><blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特似乎是最安全的亿万富翁：善良的那种。巴菲特既不是扎克伯格式的救世主，也不是麝香式的挑衅者，既不是贝佐斯式的太空学员，也不是萨克勒式的殡仪员。他是，或者看起来是，安静、谦逊、对金钱漠不关心、乐善好施，对让他崛起的体制持批评态度。几年前，一项增税提案以他的名字命名。</blockquote></p><p> It’s easy for people to think: If only members of the Sackler family were more like Mr. Buffett, imagine how many lives would have been saved. If only the billionaires who haven’t signed the Giving Pledge would give away as much as Mr. Buffett has pledged to, imagine the impact on the world. If only more billionaires would make use of the system without feeling the need to pervert it, so many of our troubles would vanish.</p><p><blockquote>人们很容易想到：要是萨克勒家族的成员更像巴菲特先生就好了，想象一下会有多少人的生命得到挽救。如果没有签署捐赠誓言的亿万富翁们能像巴菲特先生承诺的那样捐赠那么多，想象一下对世界的影响。如果更多的亿万富翁能够利用这个系统，而不觉得有必要扭曲它，我们的许多麻烦就会消失。</blockquote></p><p> So I regret to inform you that Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system.</p><p><blockquote>所以我很遗憾地告诉大家，巴菲特先生实际上是我们拥有的最危险的亿万富翁。最糟糕的亿万富翁是优秀的亿万富翁。让它看起来像是问题的人是系统的扭曲，而事实上，问题是系统。</blockquote></p><p> Actually malevolent and disastrously negligent plutocrats get most of the attention. And when we hear about these Bad Billionaire exploits, it is possible to conclude from them that the system needs better policing, updated regulations and maybe slightly higher taxes. The system needs to be made to work again.</p><p><blockquote>事实上，恶意和灾难性疏忽的财阀得到了最多的关注。当我们听到这些糟糕的亿万富翁剥削时，有可能从中得出结论，该系统需要更好的监管、更新的法规，也许还需要稍微提高税收。这个系统需要重新工作。</blockquote></p><p> But as America slouches toward plutocracy, our problem isn’t the virtue level of billionaires. It’s a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity and the occasion to pursue their happiness.</p><p><blockquote>但随着美国无精打采地走向富豪统治，我们的问题不在于亿万富翁的美德水平。这是一套社会安排，使任何人都有可能获得、保护和保留如此多的财富，即使数百万人缺乏食物、工作、住房、健康、连通性、教育、尊严和追求幸福的机会。</blockquote></p><p> There is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty, a system whose tax code and labor laws and regulatory apparatus prioritize your needs above most people’s. Even noted Good Billionaire Mr. Buffett has profited from Coca-Cola’s sugary drinks, Amazon’s union busting, Chevron’s oil drilling, Clayton Homes’s predatory loans and, as the country learned recently, the failure to tax billionaires on their wealth.</p><p><blockquote>在美国，如果不利用一个建立在残酷基础上的体系，就不可能成为亿万富翁，这个体系的税法、劳动法和监管机构将你的需求置于大多数人的需求之上。即使是著名的亿万富翁巴菲特也从可口可乐的含糖饮料、亚马逊的工会破坏、雪佛龙的石油钻探、克莱顿住宅的掠夺性贷款以及美国最近了解到的未能对亿万富翁的财富征税中获利。</blockquote></p><p> The Good Billionaire myth took a hard blow in recent days when Mr. Buffett won a dubious distinction. A staggering exposé published by ProPublica revealed just how little the biggest plutocrats pay in taxes, despite mounting piles of wealth. And at the very top of that list of plutocrats — many of them with troubled reputations — was the cleanest, grandfatherliest plutocrat of them all: Mr. Buffett.</p><p><blockquote>最近几天，当巴菲特赢得一项可疑的荣誉时，亿万富翁的神话受到了沉重打击。ProPublica发布的一份令人震惊的曝光显示，尽管财富不断增加，但最大的富豪缴纳的税款是多么之少。在这份富豪名单中——他们中的许多人名声不佳——最干净、最慷慨的是巴菲特先生。</blockquote></p><p> ProPublica’s story was unusual in that, for once, it was the Good Billionaire at the top of the naughty list. This was helpful, because it served to indict the system that makes him possible, even when it is working perfectly, wholly lawfully.</p><p><blockquote>ProPublica的故事不同寻常，因为这一次，它是在淘气名单上名列前茅的优秀亿万富翁。这是有帮助的，因为它有助于起诉使他成为可能的系统，即使它是完美的，完全合法的。</blockquote></p><p> From 2014 to 2018, Mr. Buffett’s wealth soared by $24.3 billion, according to ProPublica. (To underline, this is just the amount the fortune grew.) The amount of taxes Mr. Buffett paid over this period? $23.7 million. If middle-class Americans in their 40s enjoyed such a low effective tax rate, they would have paid a few dozen bucks per household over this same time period. Instead, as the ProPublica story notes, they paid around $62,000.</p><p><blockquote>根据ProPublica的数据，从2014年到2018年，巴菲特的财富飙升了243亿美元。（需要强调的是，这只是财富增长的金额。）巴菲特先生在此期间缴纳的税款？2370万美元。如果40多岁的美国中产阶级享受如此低的有效税率，他们在同一时期每户将支付几十美元。相反，正如ProPublica的故事所指出的，他们支付了大约62,000美元。</blockquote></p><p> Imagine if Mr. Buffett had to pay the same fraction of the growth of his net worth that regular people do. Taxing that money could have helped pay for bridge repairs, mammograms, and free day care. More important — and this isn’t said enough — there is intrinsic value in shrinking gargantuan fortunes. The sway plutocrats have over public life is inconsistent with a one person, one vote democracy.</p><p><blockquote>想象一下，如果巴菲特先生必须支付与普通人相同比例的净资产增长。对这笔钱征税可以帮助支付桥梁维修、乳房x光检查和免费日托。更重要的是——这还不够——巨额财富的缩水具有内在价值。财阀对公共生活的影响力与一人一票的民主不一致。</blockquote></p><p> The important point here is that Mr. Buffett’s tax payments as detailed by ProPublica are fully legal. Though Mr. Buffett has called for changing the tax system, while we have the one we have, he will continue to benefit from the madness of taxing billionaires for their income, rather than their wealth, when their income is pretty much just a number they can construct.</p><p><blockquote>这里重要的一点是，ProPublica详细介绍的巴菲特先生的纳税情况是完全合法的。尽管巴菲特先生呼吁改变税收制度，但当我们拥有现有的税收制度时，他将继续受益于对亿万富翁的收入而不是财富征税的疯狂行为，而他们的收入几乎只是一个数字。他们可以构建。</blockquote></p><p> I asked Mr. Buffett last week, via his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek, if he could think of even one tax or accounting practice that he has come to regret. Sure, he may have followed the letter of the law. But was there any aspect of his patriotism or humanity that left him feeling guilty for hoarding so much untaxed when regular people pay so much in taxes? Though Ms. Bosanek responded to an initial inquiry, she declined to offer any such examples.</p><p><blockquote>上周，我通过巴菲特的长期秘书黛比·博萨内克（Debbie Bosanek）问他是否能想到一个让他后悔的税务或会计做法。当然，他可能遵守了法律条文。但是，当普通人缴纳如此多的税款时，他的爱国主义或人性是否有任何方面让他为囤积如此多未缴税而感到内疚？尽管Bosanek女士对初步调查做出了回应，但她拒绝提供任何此类例子。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> In a long statement last week, Mr. Buffett defended himself by pointing to his long advocacy for a fairer taxation system, and then he immediately told on himself by undermining the very idea of taxes in the same letter. “I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.”</p><p><blockquote>在上周的一份长篇声明中，巴菲特为自己辩护，指出他长期以来一直倡导更公平的税收制度，然后他立即在同一封信中破坏了税收的想法。“我相信，如果这笔钱用于慈善事业，比用于略微减少不断增加的美国债务对社会的用处更大。”</blockquote></p><p> In other words: I believe in higher income taxes on people like me, but I’m highly organized to avoid having income to report, and I don’t really believe in taxes because I think I should decide how these surplus resources are spent.</p><p><blockquote>换句话说：我相信对像我这样的人征收更高的所得税，但我高度组织化以避免报告收入，我并不真正相信税收，因为我认为我应该决定如何使用这些剩余资源。</blockquote></p><p> And this points to another way in which the Good Billionaire is hard to deal with. The crooks and the scoundrels and the people manifestly looking for quick P.R. highs come to philanthropy for the marketing payoff. When Goldman Sachs announces a new initiative on fighting the racial wealth gap despite having done little to repair the damage it did to Black homeowners in contributing to the 2008 financial meltdown, some may be fooled, but, more and more, many are not.</p><p><blockquote>这指出了优秀亿万富翁难以相处的另一种方式。骗子、无赖和明显寻求快速公关高潮的人来到慈善事业是为了营销回报。当高盛宣布一项消除种族贫富差距的新举措时，尽管它几乎没有采取任何措施来修复2008年金融危机对黑人房主造成的损害，一些人可能会被愚弄，但越来越多的人没有被愚弄。</blockquote></p><p> Supposed Good Billionaires like Mr. Buffett and his friend Bill Gates are more complicated because they give real money. They may benefit from marketing but also seem to many people to be motivated by more than that, and they apply their smarts to the work.</p><p><blockquote>像巴菲特先生和他的朋友比尔·盖茨这样所谓的好亿万富翁更复杂，因为他们给的是真金白银。他们可能会从营销中受益，但在许多人看来，他们的动机不止于此，他们将自己的智慧运用到工作中。</blockquote></p><p> Yet because of this, it is often the Good Billionaires who end up with the most illegitimate influence over public life. No one is asking members of the Sackler family for public health advice. But Mr. Gates has become a major policy voice on vaccines despite holding no elected position. Mr. Buffett, for his part, has shied away from that kind of lane hopping and richsplaining, but in donating his fortune to Mr. Gates’s foundation he has pumped up that undemocratic influence.</p><p><blockquote>然而，正因为如此，往往是优秀的亿万富翁最终对公共生活产生了最不正当的影响。没有人向萨克勒家族成员寻求公共卫生建议。但是盖茨先生已经成为疫苗政策的主要代言人，尽管他没有担任民选职位。就巴菲特而言，他避免了这种跳跃和炫耀财富的行为，但通过将自己的财富捐给盖茨的基金会，他增强了这种不民主的影响力。</blockquote></p><p> Mr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.</p><p><blockquote>在这个时刻，巴菲特先生几乎是完美的亿万富翁，许多美国人终于开始不仅质疑金融体系的腐败，还质疑亿万富翁是否应该存在。他不会做他们中最坏的人会做的事情。他不是为了他们的目的。他显然关心钱，但他也有点不在乎钱。即使在他的慷慨中，他也避免了别人无法抗拒的帝国统治。</blockquote></p><p> And this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.</p><p><blockquote>这就是他如此令人不安的原因，因为通过他，我们倾向于相信一个系统是可以捍卫的，这个系统允许一个人在人们睡觉的时候积累超过1000亿美元，抵押给他，在他的活动房屋里，用他投资的饮料缩短他们的寿命，在仓库里蹦蹦跳跳，这些仓库的非工会身份帮助了他的钱堆。</blockquote></p><p> It can’t. And who keeps us from seeing that simple, stark truth more effectively, more perniciously, than the Good Billionaire?</p><p><blockquote>它不能。谁能比善良的亿万富翁更有效、更有害地阻止我们看到这个简单、赤裸裸的事实呢？</blockquote></p><p></p>","source":"lsy1608616134662","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Warren Buffett and the Myth of the ‘Good Billionaire’<blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特和“优秀亿万富翁”的神话</blockquote></title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nWarren Buffett and the Myth of the ‘Good Billionaire’<blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特和“优秀亿万富翁”的神话</blockquote>\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n<p class=\"head\">\n<strong class=\"h-name small\">The New York Times</strong><span class=\"h-time small\">2021-06-15 08:18</span>\n</p>\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\n<p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/002912ff5cccdf9eee5a5197b6b82e93\" tg-width=\"1600\" tg-height=\"1600\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"><span>Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph via Getty</span></p><p><blockquote><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><span>《纽约时报》插图；照片来自盖蒂</span></p></blockquote></p><p> Warren Buffett appears to be the safest kind of billionaire: the good kind. Mr. Buffett is neither Zuckerbergian messiah nor Musky provocateur, neither Bezosist space cadet nor Sacklerian undertaker. He is, or seems to be, quiet, humble, indifferent to money, philanthropic and critical of the system that allowed him to rise. Years ago, a proposed tax increase was named after him.</p><p><blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特似乎是最安全的亿万富翁：善良的那种。巴菲特既不是扎克伯格式的救世主，也不是麝香式的挑衅者，既不是贝佐斯式的太空学员，也不是萨克勒式的殡仪员。他是，或者看起来是，安静、谦逊、对金钱漠不关心、乐善好施，对让他崛起的体制持批评态度。几年前，一项增税提案以他的名字命名。</blockquote></p><p> It’s easy for people to think: If only members of the Sackler family were more like Mr. Buffett, imagine how many lives would have been saved. If only the billionaires who haven’t signed the Giving Pledge would give away as much as Mr. Buffett has pledged to, imagine the impact on the world. If only more billionaires would make use of the system without feeling the need to pervert it, so many of our troubles would vanish.</p><p><blockquote>人们很容易想到：要是萨克勒家族的成员更像巴菲特先生就好了，想象一下会有多少人的生命得到挽救。如果没有签署捐赠誓言的亿万富翁们能像巴菲特先生承诺的那样捐赠那么多，想象一下对世界的影响。如果更多的亿万富翁能够利用这个系统，而不觉得有必要扭曲它，我们的许多麻烦就会消失。</blockquote></p><p> So I regret to inform you that Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system.</p><p><blockquote>所以我很遗憾地告诉大家，巴菲特先生实际上是我们拥有的最危险的亿万富翁。最糟糕的亿万富翁是优秀的亿万富翁。让它看起来像是问题的人是系统的扭曲，而事实上，问题是系统。</blockquote></p><p> Actually malevolent and disastrously negligent plutocrats get most of the attention. And when we hear about these Bad Billionaire exploits, it is possible to conclude from them that the system needs better policing, updated regulations and maybe slightly higher taxes. The system needs to be made to work again.</p><p><blockquote>事实上，恶意和灾难性疏忽的财阀得到了最多的关注。当我们听到这些糟糕的亿万富翁剥削时，有可能从中得出结论，该系统需要更好的监管、更新的法规，也许还需要稍微提高税收。这个系统需要重新工作。</blockquote></p><p> But as America slouches toward plutocracy, our problem isn’t the virtue level of billionaires. It’s a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity and the occasion to pursue their happiness.</p><p><blockquote>但随着美国无精打采地走向富豪统治，我们的问题不在于亿万富翁的美德水平。这是一套社会安排，使任何人都有可能获得、保护和保留如此多的财富，即使数百万人缺乏食物、工作、住房、健康、连通性、教育、尊严和追求幸福的机会。</blockquote></p><p> There is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty, a system whose tax code and labor laws and regulatory apparatus prioritize your needs above most people’s. Even noted Good Billionaire Mr. Buffett has profited from Coca-Cola’s sugary drinks, Amazon’s union busting, Chevron’s oil drilling, Clayton Homes’s predatory loans and, as the country learned recently, the failure to tax billionaires on their wealth.</p><p><blockquote>在美国，如果不利用一个建立在残酷基础上的体系，就不可能成为亿万富翁，这个体系的税法、劳动法和监管机构将你的需求置于大多数人的需求之上。即使是著名的亿万富翁巴菲特也从可口可乐的含糖饮料、亚马逊的工会破坏、雪佛龙的石油钻探、克莱顿住宅的掠夺性贷款以及美国最近了解到的未能对亿万富翁的财富征税中获利。</blockquote></p><p> The Good Billionaire myth took a hard blow in recent days when Mr. Buffett won a dubious distinction. A staggering exposé published by ProPublica revealed just how little the biggest plutocrats pay in taxes, despite mounting piles of wealth. And at the very top of that list of plutocrats — many of them with troubled reputations — was the cleanest, grandfatherliest plutocrat of them all: Mr. Buffett.</p><p><blockquote>最近几天，当巴菲特赢得一项可疑的荣誉时，亿万富翁的神话受到了沉重打击。ProPublica发布的一份令人震惊的曝光显示，尽管财富不断增加，但最大的富豪缴纳的税款是多么之少。在这份富豪名单中——他们中的许多人名声不佳——最干净、最慷慨的是巴菲特先生。</blockquote></p><p> ProPublica’s story was unusual in that, for once, it was the Good Billionaire at the top of the naughty list. This was helpful, because it served to indict the system that makes him possible, even when it is working perfectly, wholly lawfully.</p><p><blockquote>ProPublica的故事不同寻常，因为这一次，它是在淘气名单上名列前茅的优秀亿万富翁。这是有帮助的，因为它有助于起诉使他成为可能的系统，即使它是完美的，完全合法的。</blockquote></p><p> From 2014 to 2018, Mr. Buffett’s wealth soared by $24.3 billion, according to ProPublica. (To underline, this is just the amount the fortune grew.) The amount of taxes Mr. Buffett paid over this period? $23.7 million. If middle-class Americans in their 40s enjoyed such a low effective tax rate, they would have paid a few dozen bucks per household over this same time period. Instead, as the ProPublica story notes, they paid around $62,000.</p><p><blockquote>根据ProPublica的数据，从2014年到2018年，巴菲特的财富飙升了243亿美元。（需要强调的是，这只是财富增长的金额。）巴菲特先生在此期间缴纳的税款？2370万美元。如果40多岁的美国中产阶级享受如此低的有效税率，他们在同一时期每户将支付几十美元。相反，正如ProPublica的故事所指出的，他们支付了大约62,000美元。</blockquote></p><p> Imagine if Mr. Buffett had to pay the same fraction of the growth of his net worth that regular people do. Taxing that money could have helped pay for bridge repairs, mammograms, and free day care. More important — and this isn’t said enough — there is intrinsic value in shrinking gargantuan fortunes. The sway plutocrats have over public life is inconsistent with a one person, one vote democracy.</p><p><blockquote>想象一下，如果巴菲特先生必须支付与普通人相同比例的净资产增长。对这笔钱征税可以帮助支付桥梁维修、乳房x光检查和免费日托。更重要的是——这还不够——巨额财富的缩水具有内在价值。财阀对公共生活的影响力与一人一票的民主不一致。</blockquote></p><p> The important point here is that Mr. Buffett’s tax payments as detailed by ProPublica are fully legal. Though Mr. Buffett has called for changing the tax system, while we have the one we have, he will continue to benefit from the madness of taxing billionaires for their income, rather than their wealth, when their income is pretty much just a number they can construct.</p><p><blockquote>这里重要的一点是，ProPublica详细介绍的巴菲特先生的纳税情况是完全合法的。尽管巴菲特先生呼吁改变税收制度，但当我们拥有现有的税收制度时，他将继续受益于对亿万富翁的收入而不是财富征税的疯狂行为，而他们的收入几乎只是一个数字。他们可以构建。</blockquote></p><p> I asked Mr. Buffett last week, via his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek, if he could think of even one tax or accounting practice that he has come to regret. Sure, he may have followed the letter of the law. But was there any aspect of his patriotism or humanity that left him feeling guilty for hoarding so much untaxed when regular people pay so much in taxes? Though Ms. Bosanek responded to an initial inquiry, she declined to offer any such examples.</p><p><blockquote>上周，我通过巴菲特的长期秘书黛比·博萨内克（Debbie Bosanek）问他是否能想到一个让他后悔的税务或会计做法。当然，他可能遵守了法律条文。但是，当普通人缴纳如此多的税款时，他的爱国主义或人性是否有任何方面让他为囤积如此多未缴税而感到内疚？尽管Bosanek女士对初步调查做出了回应，但她拒绝提供任何此类例子。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> In a long statement last week, Mr. Buffett defended himself by pointing to his long advocacy for a fairer taxation system, and then he immediately told on himself by undermining the very idea of taxes in the same letter. “I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.”</p><p><blockquote>在上周的一份长篇声明中，巴菲特为自己辩护，指出他长期以来一直倡导更公平的税收制度，然后他立即在同一封信中破坏了税收的想法。“我相信，如果这笔钱用于慈善事业，比用于略微减少不断增加的美国债务对社会的用处更大。”</blockquote></p><p> In other words: I believe in higher income taxes on people like me, but I’m highly organized to avoid having income to report, and I don’t really believe in taxes because I think I should decide how these surplus resources are spent.</p><p><blockquote>换句话说：我相信对像我这样的人征收更高的所得税，但我高度组织化以避免报告收入，我并不真正相信税收，因为我认为我应该决定如何使用这些剩余资源。</blockquote></p><p> And this points to another way in which the Good Billionaire is hard to deal with. The crooks and the scoundrels and the people manifestly looking for quick P.R. highs come to philanthropy for the marketing payoff. When Goldman Sachs announces a new initiative on fighting the racial wealth gap despite having done little to repair the damage it did to Black homeowners in contributing to the 2008 financial meltdown, some may be fooled, but, more and more, many are not.</p><p><blockquote>这指出了优秀亿万富翁难以相处的另一种方式。骗子、无赖和明显寻求快速公关高潮的人来到慈善事业是为了营销回报。当高盛宣布一项消除种族贫富差距的新举措时，尽管它几乎没有采取任何措施来修复2008年金融危机对黑人房主造成的损害，一些人可能会被愚弄，但越来越多的人没有被愚弄。</blockquote></p><p> Supposed Good Billionaires like Mr. Buffett and his friend Bill Gates are more complicated because they give real money. They may benefit from marketing but also seem to many people to be motivated by more than that, and they apply their smarts to the work.</p><p><blockquote>像巴菲特先生和他的朋友比尔·盖茨这样所谓的好亿万富翁更复杂，因为他们给的是真金白银。他们可能会从营销中受益，但在许多人看来，他们的动机不止于此，他们将自己的智慧运用到工作中。</blockquote></p><p> Yet because of this, it is often the Good Billionaires who end up with the most illegitimate influence over public life. No one is asking members of the Sackler family for public health advice. But Mr. Gates has become a major policy voice on vaccines despite holding no elected position. Mr. Buffett, for his part, has shied away from that kind of lane hopping and richsplaining, but in donating his fortune to Mr. Gates’s foundation he has pumped up that undemocratic influence.</p><p><blockquote>然而，正因为如此，往往是优秀的亿万富翁最终对公共生活产生了最不正当的影响。没有人向萨克勒家族成员寻求公共卫生建议。但是盖茨先生已经成为疫苗政策的主要代言人，尽管他没有担任民选职位。就巴菲特而言，他避免了这种跳跃和炫耀财富的行为，但通过将自己的财富捐给盖茨的基金会，他增强了这种不民主的影响力。</blockquote></p><p> Mr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.</p><p><blockquote>在这个时刻，巴菲特先生几乎是完美的亿万富翁，许多美国人终于开始不仅质疑金融体系的腐败，还质疑亿万富翁是否应该存在。他不会做他们中最坏的人会做的事情。他不是为了他们的目的。他显然关心钱，但他也有点不在乎钱。即使在他的慷慨中，他也避免了别人无法抗拒的帝国统治。</blockquote></p><p> And this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.</p><p><blockquote>这就是他如此令人不安的原因，因为通过他，我们倾向于相信一个系统是可以捍卫的，这个系统允许一个人在人们睡觉的时候积累超过1000亿美元，抵押给他，在他的活动房屋里，用他投资的饮料缩短他们的寿命，在仓库里蹦蹦跳跳，这些仓库的非工会身份帮助了他的钱堆。</blockquote></p><p> It can’t. And who keeps us from seeing that simple, stark truth more effectively, more perniciously, than the Good Billionaire?</p><p><blockquote>它不能。谁能比善良的亿万富翁更有效、更有害地阻止我们看到这个简单、赤裸裸的事实呢？</blockquote></p><p></p>\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n<p> 来源：<a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opinion/warren-buffett-billionaire-taxes.html?searchResultPosition=1\">The New York Times</a></p>\n<p>为提升您的阅读体验，我们对本页面进行了排版优化</p>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BRK.B":"伯克希尔B","BRK.A":"伯克希尔"},"source_url":"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opinion/warren-buffett-billionaire-taxes.html?searchResultPosition=1","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1112731941","content_text":"Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph via Getty\nWarren Buffett appears to be the safest kind of billionaire: the good kind. Mr. Buffett is neither Zuckerbergian messiah nor Musky provocateur, neither Bezosist space cadet nor Sacklerian undertaker. He is, or seems to be, quiet, humble, indifferent to money, philanthropic and critical of the system that allowed him to rise. Years ago, a proposed tax increase was named after him.\nIt’s easy for people to think: If only members of the Sackler family were more like Mr. Buffett, imagine how many lives would have been saved. If only the billionaires who haven’t signed the Giving Pledge would give away as much as Mr. Buffett has pledged to, imagine the impact on the world. If only more billionaires would make use of the system without feeling the need to pervert it, so many of our troubles would vanish.\nSo I regret to inform you that Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system.\nActually malevolent and disastrously negligent plutocrats get most of the attention. And when we hear about these Bad Billionaire exploits, it is possible to conclude from them that the system needs better policing, updated regulations and maybe slightly higher taxes. The system needs to be made to work again.\nBut as America slouches toward plutocracy, our problem isn’t the virtue level of billionaires. It’s a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity and the occasion to pursue their happiness.\nThere is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty, a system whose tax code and labor laws and regulatory apparatus prioritize your needs above most people’s. Even noted Good Billionaire Mr. Buffett has profited from Coca-Cola’s sugary drinks, Amazon’s union busting, Chevron’s oil drilling, Clayton Homes’s predatory loans and, as the country learned recently, the failure to tax billionaires on their wealth.\nThe Good Billionaire myth took a hard blow in recent days when Mr. Buffett won a dubious distinction. A staggering exposé published by ProPublica revealed just how little the biggest plutocrats pay in taxes, despite mounting piles of wealth. And at the very top of that list of plutocrats — many of them with troubled reputations — was the cleanest, grandfatherliest plutocrat of them all: Mr. Buffett.\nProPublica’s story was unusual in that, for once, it was the Good Billionaire at the top of the naughty list. This was helpful, because it served to indict the system that makes him possible, even when it is working perfectly, wholly lawfully.\nFrom 2014 to 2018, Mr. Buffett’s wealth soared by $24.3 billion, according to ProPublica. (To underline, this is just the amount the fortune grew.) The amount of taxes Mr. Buffett paid over this period? $23.7 million. If middle-class Americans in their 40s enjoyed such a low effective tax rate, they would have paid a few dozen bucks per household over this same time period. Instead, as the ProPublica story notes, they paid around $62,000.\nImagine if Mr. Buffett had to pay the same fraction of the growth of his net worth that regular people do. Taxing that money could have helped pay for bridge repairs, mammograms, and free day care. More important — and this isn’t said enough — there is intrinsic value in shrinking gargantuan fortunes. The sway plutocrats have over public life is inconsistent with a one person, one vote democracy.\nThe important point here is that Mr. Buffett’s tax payments as detailed by ProPublica are fully legal. Though Mr. Buffett has called for changing the tax system, while we have the one we have, he will continue to benefit from the madness of taxing billionaires for their income, rather than their wealth, when their income is pretty much just a number they can construct.\nI asked Mr. Buffett last week, via his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek, if he could think of even one tax or accounting practice that he has come to regret. Sure, he may have followed the letter of the law. But was there any aspect of his patriotism or humanity that left him feeling guilty for hoarding so much untaxed when regular people pay so much in taxes? Though Ms. Bosanek responded to an initial inquiry, she declined to offer any such examples.\nIn a long statement last week, Mr. Buffett defended himself by pointing to his long advocacy for a fairer taxation system, and then he immediately told on himself by undermining the very idea of taxes in the same letter. “I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.”\nIn other words: I believe in higher income taxes on people like me, but I’m highly organized to avoid having income to report, and I don’t really believe in taxes because I think I should decide how these surplus resources are spent.\nAnd this points to another way in which the Good Billionaire is hard to deal with. The crooks and the scoundrels and the people manifestly looking for quick P.R. highs come to philanthropy for the marketing payoff. When Goldman Sachs announces a new initiative on fighting the racial wealth gap despite having done little to repair the damage it did to Black homeowners in contributing to the 2008 financial meltdown, some may be fooled, but, more and more, many are not.\nSupposed Good Billionaires like Mr. Buffett and his friend Bill Gates are more complicated because they give real money. They may benefit from marketing but also seem to many people to be motivated by more than that, and they apply their smarts to the work.\nYet because of this, it is often the Good Billionaires who end up with the most illegitimate influence over public life. No one is asking members of the Sackler family for public health advice. But Mr. Gates has become a major policy voice on vaccines despite holding no elected position. Mr. Buffett, for his part, has shied away from that kind of lane hopping and richsplaining, but in donating his fortune to Mr. Gates’s foundation he has pumped up that undemocratic influence.\nMr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.\nAnd this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.\nIt can’t. And who keeps us from seeing that simple, stark truth more effectively, more perniciously, than the Good Billionaire?","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{"BRK.B":0.9,"BRK.A":0.9}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":1045,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}],"hots":[{"id":184495589,"gmtCreate":1623720888141,"gmtModify":1634029607700,"author":{"id":"3558787185187870","authorId":"3558787185187870","name":"Jolinl","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":11,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3558787185187870","authorIdStr":"3558787185187870"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"Wow nice ","listText":"Wow nice ","text":"Wow nice","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":4,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/184495589","repostId":"1112731941","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1112731941","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1623716319,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1112731941?lang=zh_CN&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-06-15 08:18","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Warren Buffett and the Myth of the ‘Good Billionaire’<blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特和“优秀亿万富翁”的神话</blockquote>","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1112731941","media":"The New York Times","summary":"Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph via Getty\nWarren Buffett appears to be the safest kin","content":"<p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/002912ff5cccdf9eee5a5197b6b82e93\" tg-width=\"1600\" tg-height=\"1600\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"><span>Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph via Getty</span></p><p><blockquote><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><span>《纽约时报》插图；照片来自盖蒂</span></p></blockquote></p><p> Warren Buffett appears to be the safest kind of billionaire: the good kind. Mr. Buffett is neither Zuckerbergian messiah nor Musky provocateur, neither Bezosist space cadet nor Sacklerian undertaker. He is, or seems to be, quiet, humble, indifferent to money, philanthropic and critical of the system that allowed him to rise. Years ago, a proposed tax increase was named after him.</p><p><blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特似乎是最安全的亿万富翁：善良的那种。巴菲特既不是扎克伯格式的救世主，也不是麝香式的挑衅者，既不是贝佐斯式的太空学员，也不是萨克勒式的殡仪员。他是，或者看起来是，安静、谦逊、对金钱漠不关心、乐善好施，对让他崛起的体制持批评态度。几年前，一项增税提案以他的名字命名。</blockquote></p><p> It’s easy for people to think: If only members of the Sackler family were more like Mr. Buffett, imagine how many lives would have been saved. If only the billionaires who haven’t signed the Giving Pledge would give away as much as Mr. Buffett has pledged to, imagine the impact on the world. If only more billionaires would make use of the system without feeling the need to pervert it, so many of our troubles would vanish.</p><p><blockquote>人们很容易想到：要是萨克勒家族的成员更像巴菲特先生就好了，想象一下会有多少人的生命得到挽救。如果没有签署捐赠誓言的亿万富翁们能像巴菲特先生承诺的那样捐赠那么多，想象一下对世界的影响。如果更多的亿万富翁能够利用这个系统，而不觉得有必要扭曲它，我们的许多麻烦就会消失。</blockquote></p><p> So I regret to inform you that Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system.</p><p><blockquote>所以我很遗憾地告诉大家，巴菲特先生实际上是我们拥有的最危险的亿万富翁。最糟糕的亿万富翁是优秀的亿万富翁。让它看起来像是问题的人是系统的扭曲，而事实上，问题是系统。</blockquote></p><p> Actually malevolent and disastrously negligent plutocrats get most of the attention. And when we hear about these Bad Billionaire exploits, it is possible to conclude from them that the system needs better policing, updated regulations and maybe slightly higher taxes. The system needs to be made to work again.</p><p><blockquote>事实上，恶意和灾难性疏忽的财阀得到了最多的关注。当我们听到这些糟糕的亿万富翁剥削时，有可能从中得出结论，该系统需要更好的监管、更新的法规，也许还需要稍微提高税收。这个系统需要重新工作。</blockquote></p><p> But as America slouches toward plutocracy, our problem isn’t the virtue level of billionaires. It’s a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity and the occasion to pursue their happiness.</p><p><blockquote>但随着美国无精打采地走向富豪统治，我们的问题不在于亿万富翁的美德水平。这是一套社会安排，使任何人都有可能获得、保护和保留如此多的财富，即使数百万人缺乏食物、工作、住房、健康、连通性、教育、尊严和追求幸福的机会。</blockquote></p><p> There is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty, a system whose tax code and labor laws and regulatory apparatus prioritize your needs above most people’s. Even noted Good Billionaire Mr. Buffett has profited from Coca-Cola’s sugary drinks, Amazon’s union busting, Chevron’s oil drilling, Clayton Homes’s predatory loans and, as the country learned recently, the failure to tax billionaires on their wealth.</p><p><blockquote>在美国，如果不利用一个建立在残酷基础上的体系，就不可能成为亿万富翁，这个体系的税法、劳动法和监管机构将你的需求置于大多数人的需求之上。即使是著名的亿万富翁巴菲特也从可口可乐的含糖饮料、亚马逊的工会破坏、雪佛龙的石油钻探、克莱顿住宅的掠夺性贷款以及美国最近了解到的未能对亿万富翁的财富征税中获利。</blockquote></p><p> The Good Billionaire myth took a hard blow in recent days when Mr. Buffett won a dubious distinction. A staggering exposé published by ProPublica revealed just how little the biggest plutocrats pay in taxes, despite mounting piles of wealth. And at the very top of that list of plutocrats — many of them with troubled reputations — was the cleanest, grandfatherliest plutocrat of them all: Mr. Buffett.</p><p><blockquote>最近几天，当巴菲特赢得一项可疑的荣誉时，亿万富翁的神话受到了沉重打击。ProPublica发布的一份令人震惊的曝光显示，尽管财富不断增加，但最大的富豪缴纳的税款是多么之少。在这份富豪名单中——他们中的许多人名声不佳——最干净、最慷慨的是巴菲特先生。</blockquote></p><p> ProPublica’s story was unusual in that, for once, it was the Good Billionaire at the top of the naughty list. This was helpful, because it served to indict the system that makes him possible, even when it is working perfectly, wholly lawfully.</p><p><blockquote>ProPublica的故事不同寻常，因为这一次，它是在淘气名单上名列前茅的优秀亿万富翁。这是有帮助的，因为它有助于起诉使他成为可能的系统，即使它是完美的，完全合法的。</blockquote></p><p> From 2014 to 2018, Mr. Buffett’s wealth soared by $24.3 billion, according to ProPublica. (To underline, this is just the amount the fortune grew.) The amount of taxes Mr. Buffett paid over this period? $23.7 million. If middle-class Americans in their 40s enjoyed such a low effective tax rate, they would have paid a few dozen bucks per household over this same time period. Instead, as the ProPublica story notes, they paid around $62,000.</p><p><blockquote>根据ProPublica的数据，从2014年到2018年，巴菲特的财富飙升了243亿美元。（需要强调的是，这只是财富增长的金额。）巴菲特先生在此期间缴纳的税款？2370万美元。如果40多岁的美国中产阶级享受如此低的有效税率，他们在同一时期每户将支付几十美元。相反，正如ProPublica的故事所指出的，他们支付了大约62,000美元。</blockquote></p><p> Imagine if Mr. Buffett had to pay the same fraction of the growth of his net worth that regular people do. Taxing that money could have helped pay for bridge repairs, mammograms, and free day care. More important — and this isn’t said enough — there is intrinsic value in shrinking gargantuan fortunes. The sway plutocrats have over public life is inconsistent with a one person, one vote democracy.</p><p><blockquote>想象一下，如果巴菲特先生必须支付与普通人相同比例的净资产增长。对这笔钱征税可以帮助支付桥梁维修、乳房x光检查和免费日托。更重要的是——这还不够——巨额财富的缩水具有内在价值。财阀对公共生活的影响力与一人一票的民主不一致。</blockquote></p><p> The important point here is that Mr. Buffett’s tax payments as detailed by ProPublica are fully legal. Though Mr. Buffett has called for changing the tax system, while we have the one we have, he will continue to benefit from the madness of taxing billionaires for their income, rather than their wealth, when their income is pretty much just a number they can construct.</p><p><blockquote>这里重要的一点是，ProPublica详细介绍的巴菲特先生的纳税情况是完全合法的。尽管巴菲特先生呼吁改变税收制度，但当我们拥有现有的税收制度时，他将继续受益于对亿万富翁的收入而不是财富征税的疯狂行为，而他们的收入几乎只是一个数字。他们可以构建。</blockquote></p><p> I asked Mr. Buffett last week, via his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek, if he could think of even one tax or accounting practice that he has come to regret. Sure, he may have followed the letter of the law. But was there any aspect of his patriotism or humanity that left him feeling guilty for hoarding so much untaxed when regular people pay so much in taxes? Though Ms. Bosanek responded to an initial inquiry, she declined to offer any such examples.</p><p><blockquote>上周，我通过巴菲特的长期秘书黛比·博萨内克（Debbie Bosanek）问他是否能想到一个让他后悔的税务或会计做法。当然，他可能遵守了法律条文。但是，当普通人缴纳如此多的税款时，他的爱国主义或人性是否有任何方面让他为囤积如此多未缴税而感到内疚？尽管Bosanek女士对初步调查做出了回应，但她拒绝提供任何此类例子。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> In a long statement last week, Mr. Buffett defended himself by pointing to his long advocacy for a fairer taxation system, and then he immediately told on himself by undermining the very idea of taxes in the same letter. “I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.”</p><p><blockquote>在上周的一份长篇声明中，巴菲特为自己辩护，指出他长期以来一直倡导更公平的税收制度，然后他立即在同一封信中破坏了税收的想法。“我相信，如果这笔钱用于慈善事业，比用于略微减少不断增加的美国债务对社会的用处更大。”</blockquote></p><p> In other words: I believe in higher income taxes on people like me, but I’m highly organized to avoid having income to report, and I don’t really believe in taxes because I think I should decide how these surplus resources are spent.</p><p><blockquote>换句话说：我相信对像我这样的人征收更高的所得税，但我高度组织化以避免报告收入，我并不真正相信税收，因为我认为我应该决定如何使用这些剩余资源。</blockquote></p><p> And this points to another way in which the Good Billionaire is hard to deal with. The crooks and the scoundrels and the people manifestly looking for quick P.R. highs come to philanthropy for the marketing payoff. When Goldman Sachs announces a new initiative on fighting the racial wealth gap despite having done little to repair the damage it did to Black homeowners in contributing to the 2008 financial meltdown, some may be fooled, but, more and more, many are not.</p><p><blockquote>这指出了优秀亿万富翁难以相处的另一种方式。骗子、无赖和明显寻求快速公关高潮的人来到慈善事业是为了营销回报。当高盛宣布一项消除种族贫富差距的新举措时，尽管它几乎没有采取任何措施来修复2008年金融危机对黑人房主造成的损害，一些人可能会被愚弄，但越来越多的人没有被愚弄。</blockquote></p><p> Supposed Good Billionaires like Mr. Buffett and his friend Bill Gates are more complicated because they give real money. They may benefit from marketing but also seem to many people to be motivated by more than that, and they apply their smarts to the work.</p><p><blockquote>像巴菲特先生和他的朋友比尔·盖茨这样所谓的好亿万富翁更复杂，因为他们给的是真金白银。他们可能会从营销中受益，但在许多人看来，他们的动机不止于此，他们将自己的智慧运用到工作中。</blockquote></p><p> Yet because of this, it is often the Good Billionaires who end up with the most illegitimate influence over public life. No one is asking members of the Sackler family for public health advice. But Mr. Gates has become a major policy voice on vaccines despite holding no elected position. Mr. Buffett, for his part, has shied away from that kind of lane hopping and richsplaining, but in donating his fortune to Mr. Gates’s foundation he has pumped up that undemocratic influence.</p><p><blockquote>然而，正因为如此，往往是优秀的亿万富翁最终对公共生活产生了最不正当的影响。没有人向萨克勒家族成员寻求公共卫生建议。但是盖茨先生已经成为疫苗政策的主要代言人，尽管他没有担任民选职位。就巴菲特而言，他避免了这种跳跃和炫耀财富的行为，但通过将自己的财富捐给盖茨的基金会，他增强了这种不民主的影响力。</blockquote></p><p> Mr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.</p><p><blockquote>在这个时刻，巴菲特先生几乎是完美的亿万富翁，许多美国人终于开始不仅质疑金融体系的腐败，还质疑亿万富翁是否应该存在。他不会做他们中最坏的人会做的事情。他不是为了他们的目的。他显然关心钱，但他也有点不在乎钱。即使在他的慷慨中，他也避免了别人无法抗拒的帝国统治。</blockquote></p><p> And this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.</p><p><blockquote>这就是他如此令人不安的原因，因为通过他，我们倾向于相信一个系统是可以捍卫的，这个系统允许一个人在人们睡觉的时候积累超过1000亿美元，抵押给他，在他的活动房屋里，用他投资的饮料缩短他们的寿命，在仓库里蹦蹦跳跳，这些仓库的非工会身份帮助了他的钱堆。</blockquote></p><p> It can’t. And who keeps us from seeing that simple, stark truth more effectively, more perniciously, than the Good Billionaire?</p><p><blockquote>它不能。谁能比善良的亿万富翁更有效、更有害地阻止我们看到这个简单、赤裸裸的事实呢？</blockquote></p><p></p>","source":"lsy1608616134662","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Warren Buffett and the Myth of the ‘Good Billionaire’<blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特和“优秀亿万富翁”的神话</blockquote></title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nWarren Buffett and the Myth of the ‘Good Billionaire’<blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特和“优秀亿万富翁”的神话</blockquote>\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n<p class=\"head\">\n<strong class=\"h-name small\">The New York Times</strong><span class=\"h-time small\">2021-06-15 08:18</span>\n</p>\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\n<p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/002912ff5cccdf9eee5a5197b6b82e93\" tg-width=\"1600\" tg-height=\"1600\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"><span>Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph via Getty</span></p><p><blockquote><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><span>《纽约时报》插图；照片来自盖蒂</span></p></blockquote></p><p> Warren Buffett appears to be the safest kind of billionaire: the good kind. Mr. Buffett is neither Zuckerbergian messiah nor Musky provocateur, neither Bezosist space cadet nor Sacklerian undertaker. He is, or seems to be, quiet, humble, indifferent to money, philanthropic and critical of the system that allowed him to rise. Years ago, a proposed tax increase was named after him.</p><p><blockquote>沃伦·巴菲特似乎是最安全的亿万富翁：善良的那种。巴菲特既不是扎克伯格式的救世主，也不是麝香式的挑衅者，既不是贝佐斯式的太空学员，也不是萨克勒式的殡仪员。他是，或者看起来是，安静、谦逊、对金钱漠不关心、乐善好施，对让他崛起的体制持批评态度。几年前，一项增税提案以他的名字命名。</blockquote></p><p> It’s easy for people to think: If only members of the Sackler family were more like Mr. Buffett, imagine how many lives would have been saved. If only the billionaires who haven’t signed the Giving Pledge would give away as much as Mr. Buffett has pledged to, imagine the impact on the world. If only more billionaires would make use of the system without feeling the need to pervert it, so many of our troubles would vanish.</p><p><blockquote>人们很容易想到：要是萨克勒家族的成员更像巴菲特先生就好了，想象一下会有多少人的生命得到挽救。如果没有签署捐赠誓言的亿万富翁们能像巴菲特先生承诺的那样捐赠那么多，想象一下对世界的影响。如果更多的亿万富翁能够利用这个系统，而不觉得有必要扭曲它，我们的许多麻烦就会消失。</blockquote></p><p> So I regret to inform you that Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system.</p><p><blockquote>所以我很遗憾地告诉大家，巴菲特先生实际上是我们拥有的最危险的亿万富翁。最糟糕的亿万富翁是优秀的亿万富翁。让它看起来像是问题的人是系统的扭曲，而事实上，问题是系统。</blockquote></p><p> Actually malevolent and disastrously negligent plutocrats get most of the attention. And when we hear about these Bad Billionaire exploits, it is possible to conclude from them that the system needs better policing, updated regulations and maybe slightly higher taxes. The system needs to be made to work again.</p><p><blockquote>事实上，恶意和灾难性疏忽的财阀得到了最多的关注。当我们听到这些糟糕的亿万富翁剥削时，有可能从中得出结论，该系统需要更好的监管、更新的法规，也许还需要稍微提高税收。这个系统需要重新工作。</blockquote></p><p> But as America slouches toward plutocracy, our problem isn’t the virtue level of billionaires. It’s a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity and the occasion to pursue their happiness.</p><p><blockquote>但随着美国无精打采地走向富豪统治，我们的问题不在于亿万富翁的美德水平。这是一套社会安排，使任何人都有可能获得、保护和保留如此多的财富，即使数百万人缺乏食物、工作、住房、健康、连通性、教育、尊严和追求幸福的机会。</blockquote></p><p> There is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty, a system whose tax code and labor laws and regulatory apparatus prioritize your needs above most people’s. Even noted Good Billionaire Mr. Buffett has profited from Coca-Cola’s sugary drinks, Amazon’s union busting, Chevron’s oil drilling, Clayton Homes’s predatory loans and, as the country learned recently, the failure to tax billionaires on their wealth.</p><p><blockquote>在美国，如果不利用一个建立在残酷基础上的体系，就不可能成为亿万富翁，这个体系的税法、劳动法和监管机构将你的需求置于大多数人的需求之上。即使是著名的亿万富翁巴菲特也从可口可乐的含糖饮料、亚马逊的工会破坏、雪佛龙的石油钻探、克莱顿住宅的掠夺性贷款以及美国最近了解到的未能对亿万富翁的财富征税中获利。</blockquote></p><p> The Good Billionaire myth took a hard blow in recent days when Mr. Buffett won a dubious distinction. A staggering exposé published by ProPublica revealed just how little the biggest plutocrats pay in taxes, despite mounting piles of wealth. And at the very top of that list of plutocrats — many of them with troubled reputations — was the cleanest, grandfatherliest plutocrat of them all: Mr. Buffett.</p><p><blockquote>最近几天，当巴菲特赢得一项可疑的荣誉时，亿万富翁的神话受到了沉重打击。ProPublica发布的一份令人震惊的曝光显示，尽管财富不断增加，但最大的富豪缴纳的税款是多么之少。在这份富豪名单中——他们中的许多人名声不佳——最干净、最慷慨的是巴菲特先生。</blockquote></p><p> ProPublica’s story was unusual in that, for once, it was the Good Billionaire at the top of the naughty list. This was helpful, because it served to indict the system that makes him possible, even when it is working perfectly, wholly lawfully.</p><p><blockquote>ProPublica的故事不同寻常，因为这一次，它是在淘气名单上名列前茅的优秀亿万富翁。这是有帮助的，因为它有助于起诉使他成为可能的系统，即使它是完美的，完全合法的。</blockquote></p><p> From 2014 to 2018, Mr. Buffett’s wealth soared by $24.3 billion, according to ProPublica. (To underline, this is just the amount the fortune grew.) The amount of taxes Mr. Buffett paid over this period? $23.7 million. If middle-class Americans in their 40s enjoyed such a low effective tax rate, they would have paid a few dozen bucks per household over this same time period. Instead, as the ProPublica story notes, they paid around $62,000.</p><p><blockquote>根据ProPublica的数据，从2014年到2018年，巴菲特的财富飙升了243亿美元。（需要强调的是，这只是财富增长的金额。）巴菲特先生在此期间缴纳的税款？2370万美元。如果40多岁的美国中产阶级享受如此低的有效税率，他们在同一时期每户将支付几十美元。相反，正如ProPublica的故事所指出的，他们支付了大约62,000美元。</blockquote></p><p> Imagine if Mr. Buffett had to pay the same fraction of the growth of his net worth that regular people do. Taxing that money could have helped pay for bridge repairs, mammograms, and free day care. More important — and this isn’t said enough — there is intrinsic value in shrinking gargantuan fortunes. The sway plutocrats have over public life is inconsistent with a one person, one vote democracy.</p><p><blockquote>想象一下，如果巴菲特先生必须支付与普通人相同比例的净资产增长。对这笔钱征税可以帮助支付桥梁维修、乳房x光检查和免费日托。更重要的是——这还不够——巨额财富的缩水具有内在价值。财阀对公共生活的影响力与一人一票的民主不一致。</blockquote></p><p> The important point here is that Mr. Buffett’s tax payments as detailed by ProPublica are fully legal. Though Mr. Buffett has called for changing the tax system, while we have the one we have, he will continue to benefit from the madness of taxing billionaires for their income, rather than their wealth, when their income is pretty much just a number they can construct.</p><p><blockquote>这里重要的一点是，ProPublica详细介绍的巴菲特先生的纳税情况是完全合法的。尽管巴菲特先生呼吁改变税收制度，但当我们拥有现有的税收制度时，他将继续受益于对亿万富翁的收入而不是财富征税的疯狂行为，而他们的收入几乎只是一个数字。他们可以构建。</blockquote></p><p> I asked Mr. Buffett last week, via his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek, if he could think of even one tax or accounting practice that he has come to regret. Sure, he may have followed the letter of the law. But was there any aspect of his patriotism or humanity that left him feeling guilty for hoarding so much untaxed when regular people pay so much in taxes? Though Ms. Bosanek responded to an initial inquiry, she declined to offer any such examples.</p><p><blockquote>上周，我通过巴菲特的长期秘书黛比·博萨内克（Debbie Bosanek）问他是否能想到一个让他后悔的税务或会计做法。当然，他可能遵守了法律条文。但是，当普通人缴纳如此多的税款时，他的爱国主义或人性是否有任何方面让他为囤积如此多未缴税而感到内疚？尽管Bosanek女士对初步调查做出了回应，但她拒绝提供任何此类例子。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> In a long statement last week, Mr. Buffett defended himself by pointing to his long advocacy for a fairer taxation system, and then he immediately told on himself by undermining the very idea of taxes in the same letter. “I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.”</p><p><blockquote>在上周的一份长篇声明中，巴菲特为自己辩护，指出他长期以来一直倡导更公平的税收制度，然后他立即在同一封信中破坏了税收的想法。“我相信，如果这笔钱用于慈善事业，比用于略微减少不断增加的美国债务对社会的用处更大。”</blockquote></p><p> In other words: I believe in higher income taxes on people like me, but I’m highly organized to avoid having income to report, and I don’t really believe in taxes because I think I should decide how these surplus resources are spent.</p><p><blockquote>换句话说：我相信对像我这样的人征收更高的所得税，但我高度组织化以避免报告收入，我并不真正相信税收，因为我认为我应该决定如何使用这些剩余资源。</blockquote></p><p> And this points to another way in which the Good Billionaire is hard to deal with. The crooks and the scoundrels and the people manifestly looking for quick P.R. highs come to philanthropy for the marketing payoff. When Goldman Sachs announces a new initiative on fighting the racial wealth gap despite having done little to repair the damage it did to Black homeowners in contributing to the 2008 financial meltdown, some may be fooled, but, more and more, many are not.</p><p><blockquote>这指出了优秀亿万富翁难以相处的另一种方式。骗子、无赖和明显寻求快速公关高潮的人来到慈善事业是为了营销回报。当高盛宣布一项消除种族贫富差距的新举措时，尽管它几乎没有采取任何措施来修复2008年金融危机对黑人房主造成的损害，一些人可能会被愚弄，但越来越多的人没有被愚弄。</blockquote></p><p> Supposed Good Billionaires like Mr. Buffett and his friend Bill Gates are more complicated because they give real money. They may benefit from marketing but also seem to many people to be motivated by more than that, and they apply their smarts to the work.</p><p><blockquote>像巴菲特先生和他的朋友比尔·盖茨这样所谓的好亿万富翁更复杂，因为他们给的是真金白银。他们可能会从营销中受益，但在许多人看来，他们的动机不止于此，他们将自己的智慧运用到工作中。</blockquote></p><p> Yet because of this, it is often the Good Billionaires who end up with the most illegitimate influence over public life. No one is asking members of the Sackler family for public health advice. But Mr. Gates has become a major policy voice on vaccines despite holding no elected position. Mr. Buffett, for his part, has shied away from that kind of lane hopping and richsplaining, but in donating his fortune to Mr. Gates’s foundation he has pumped up that undemocratic influence.</p><p><blockquote>然而，正因为如此，往往是优秀的亿万富翁最终对公共生活产生了最不正当的影响。没有人向萨克勒家族成员寻求公共卫生建议。但是盖茨先生已经成为疫苗政策的主要代言人，尽管他没有担任民选职位。就巴菲特而言，他避免了这种跳跃和炫耀财富的行为，但通过将自己的财富捐给盖茨的基金会，他增强了这种不民主的影响力。</blockquote></p><p> Mr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.</p><p><blockquote>在这个时刻，巴菲特先生几乎是完美的亿万富翁，许多美国人终于开始不仅质疑金融体系的腐败，还质疑亿万富翁是否应该存在。他不会做他们中最坏的人会做的事情。他不是为了他们的目的。他显然关心钱，但他也有点不在乎钱。即使在他的慷慨中，他也避免了别人无法抗拒的帝国统治。</blockquote></p><p> And this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.</p><p><blockquote>这就是他如此令人不安的原因，因为通过他，我们倾向于相信一个系统是可以捍卫的，这个系统允许一个人在人们睡觉的时候积累超过1000亿美元，抵押给他，在他的活动房屋里，用他投资的饮料缩短他们的寿命，在仓库里蹦蹦跳跳，这些仓库的非工会身份帮助了他的钱堆。</blockquote></p><p> It can’t. And who keeps us from seeing that simple, stark truth more effectively, more perniciously, than the Good Billionaire?</p><p><blockquote>它不能。谁能比善良的亿万富翁更有效、更有害地阻止我们看到这个简单、赤裸裸的事实呢？</blockquote></p><p></p>\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n<p> 来源：<a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opinion/warren-buffett-billionaire-taxes.html?searchResultPosition=1\">The New York Times</a></p>\n<p>为提升您的阅读体验，我们对本页面进行了排版优化</p>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BRK.B":"伯克希尔B","BRK.A":"伯克希尔"},"source_url":"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opinion/warren-buffett-billionaire-taxes.html?searchResultPosition=1","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1112731941","content_text":"Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph via Getty\nWarren Buffett appears to be the safest kind of billionaire: the good kind. Mr. Buffett is neither Zuckerbergian messiah nor Musky provocateur, neither Bezosist space cadet nor Sacklerian undertaker. He is, or seems to be, quiet, humble, indifferent to money, philanthropic and critical of the system that allowed him to rise. Years ago, a proposed tax increase was named after him.\nIt’s easy for people to think: If only members of the Sackler family were more like Mr. Buffett, imagine how many lives would have been saved. If only the billionaires who haven’t signed the Giving Pledge would give away as much as Mr. Buffett has pledged to, imagine the impact on the world. If only more billionaires would make use of the system without feeling the need to pervert it, so many of our troubles would vanish.\nSo I regret to inform you that Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system.\nActually malevolent and disastrously negligent plutocrats get most of the attention. And when we hear about these Bad Billionaire exploits, it is possible to conclude from them that the system needs better policing, updated regulations and maybe slightly higher taxes. The system needs to be made to work again.\nBut as America slouches toward plutocracy, our problem isn’t the virtue level of billionaires. It’s a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity and the occasion to pursue their happiness.\nThere is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty, a system whose tax code and labor laws and regulatory apparatus prioritize your needs above most people’s. Even noted Good Billionaire Mr. Buffett has profited from Coca-Cola’s sugary drinks, Amazon’s union busting, Chevron’s oil drilling, Clayton Homes’s predatory loans and, as the country learned recently, the failure to tax billionaires on their wealth.\nThe Good Billionaire myth took a hard blow in recent days when Mr. Buffett won a dubious distinction. A staggering exposé published by ProPublica revealed just how little the biggest plutocrats pay in taxes, despite mounting piles of wealth. And at the very top of that list of plutocrats — many of them with troubled reputations — was the cleanest, grandfatherliest plutocrat of them all: Mr. Buffett.\nProPublica’s story was unusual in that, for once, it was the Good Billionaire at the top of the naughty list. This was helpful, because it served to indict the system that makes him possible, even when it is working perfectly, wholly lawfully.\nFrom 2014 to 2018, Mr. Buffett’s wealth soared by $24.3 billion, according to ProPublica. (To underline, this is just the amount the fortune grew.) The amount of taxes Mr. Buffett paid over this period? $23.7 million. If middle-class Americans in their 40s enjoyed such a low effective tax rate, they would have paid a few dozen bucks per household over this same time period. Instead, as the ProPublica story notes, they paid around $62,000.\nImagine if Mr. Buffett had to pay the same fraction of the growth of his net worth that regular people do. Taxing that money could have helped pay for bridge repairs, mammograms, and free day care. More important — and this isn’t said enough — there is intrinsic value in shrinking gargantuan fortunes. The sway plutocrats have over public life is inconsistent with a one person, one vote democracy.\nThe important point here is that Mr. Buffett’s tax payments as detailed by ProPublica are fully legal. Though Mr. Buffett has called for changing the tax system, while we have the one we have, he will continue to benefit from the madness of taxing billionaires for their income, rather than their wealth, when their income is pretty much just a number they can construct.\nI asked Mr. Buffett last week, via his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek, if he could think of even one tax or accounting practice that he has come to regret. Sure, he may have followed the letter of the law. But was there any aspect of his patriotism or humanity that left him feeling guilty for hoarding so much untaxed when regular people pay so much in taxes? Though Ms. Bosanek responded to an initial inquiry, she declined to offer any such examples.\nIn a long statement last week, Mr. Buffett defended himself by pointing to his long advocacy for a fairer taxation system, and then he immediately told on himself by undermining the very idea of taxes in the same letter. “I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.”\nIn other words: I believe in higher income taxes on people like me, but I’m highly organized to avoid having income to report, and I don’t really believe in taxes because I think I should decide how these surplus resources are spent.\nAnd this points to another way in which the Good Billionaire is hard to deal with. The crooks and the scoundrels and the people manifestly looking for quick P.R. highs come to philanthropy for the marketing payoff. When Goldman Sachs announces a new initiative on fighting the racial wealth gap despite having done little to repair the damage it did to Black homeowners in contributing to the 2008 financial meltdown, some may be fooled, but, more and more, many are not.\nSupposed Good Billionaires like Mr. Buffett and his friend Bill Gates are more complicated because they give real money. They may benefit from marketing but also seem to many people to be motivated by more than that, and they apply their smarts to the work.\nYet because of this, it is often the Good Billionaires who end up with the most illegitimate influence over public life. No one is asking members of the Sackler family for public health advice. But Mr. Gates has become a major policy voice on vaccines despite holding no elected position. Mr. Buffett, for his part, has shied away from that kind of lane hopping and richsplaining, but in donating his fortune to Mr. Gates’s foundation he has pumped up that undemocratic influence.\nMr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.\nAnd this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.\nIt can’t. And who keeps us from seeing that simple, stark truth more effectively, more perniciously, than the Good Billionaire?","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{"BRK.B":0.9,"BRK.A":0.9}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":1045,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}],"lives":[]}
