Tag Archives: Warren Buffet

Stop Stupid Spending

In light of my previous article (at https://lawlordtobe.wordpress.com/2022/03/29/a-dangerous-ploy/) ‘A dangerous ploy’, we now see the BBC giving us ‘Can the super-rich solve America’s budget problem?’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60904900) the simple short direct answer is ‘No, they cannot!’ You see, it is the American administrations who clearly overspend. When you create a $1,900,000,000,000, all whilst it represents double the amount you collect through taxation, you are the losing member of a losing party. And all the clever calculator games you play will not help you. It is a sliding scale from the decline of a decent amount of wealth deep into the debt and depth of bankruptcy is all you have to look forward to ad there is no going back from this path, the US is too deep in debt already. When it was clearly visible that the overhaul of tax laws was the only real path for over two decades, the superrich will not help them overcome anything, not even their own stupidity. So when we see “The proposal aims to capture more of the wealth created by the soaring stock market of the last few years. It targets the roughly 20,000 taxpayers in the US worth more than $100m (£76m). Investor Warren Buffett, Tesla boss Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would be among those affected.” Yes you can try that approach, but in light of the money you are spending, money you do not have, it will amount to nothing. The first thing that they face is to reduce their annual budget to no more than $730,000,000,000 that is the the first thing that needs to happen, reduce it by well over 50%, that is the impact they need to face. And then those additional taxations will need to be used for 100% to reducing debt. Even then they will come up short for close to 12-15 years. Should any millionaire and billionaires have remained in the US, they could have a chance, but only if US spending goes down by well over 50% until well over 2037. That is the reality of the plight they face. So when you consider the harsh reality of “Mr Biden’s budget also calls for raising the income tax rate on households earning over $400,000 from 37% to 39.6% and increasing the tax on companies to 28%, partially reversing cuts made under the Trump administration.” It merely works if the overspending of budgets is stopped, if not this is a waste of effort and when the Americans run away from their land to try and keep what they have, we will see that zero tax havens will suddenly get an investors infuse of 200%, all whilst all this was clearly out in the open from 1999 onwards. So whilst you all consider “For the 2022 financial year, the annual deficit is projected at more than $1.2tn. Overall debt passed $30tn last month.” All whilst this administration wants to spend an additional $700,000,000,000, you see the first reality out there and it is not taxing the rich, it is controlling stupid politicians spending money they never had in the first place and it goes back to the age of Clinton, it has been going on for that long and now we see some knee jerk action that has no impact, not until the US budgets are under control. But go on, spend billions on some joke (aka USS Zumwalt class) for the amount of $4,400,000,000. And whilst we think it is cheap, consider 

That it was delivered in 2016 and from then on it faced a trial of break downs and repairs, it required redeployment of weapons, the smart guns never worked and it is now a missile launcher at 500% of the price of such a ship. That is where the budgets fall short again and again and that is merely the defence budget, a budget that has shown failure after failure. All this beside the infrastructure requirements that have not been met in close to half a decade, and they now want some lame ‘tax the rich’ approach to fix it all, all whilst the spending tap is not closed by 55%-70%. And as such, the super rich will never solve this problem. Not until Washington DC wakes up and smells the junk they shovel in. So whilst we see think tank after think tank contribute colourful mentions like “America’s 400 richest families have more wealth than all 10 million of the country’s black families combined, according to a 2020 analysis by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.” No one is asking how large the price tag of that analyses was. We see a group of people blaming a group of people all whilst they enabled all this by not overhauling tax laws, it is now well over 20 years that spending needed to be overhauled, but no, even this administration overspends by close to $1,700,000,000,000 and it does not stop with the $1.2tn deficit, the interest of $30tn is also due and there is no solution for all that, the previous leaseholders of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue made that mistake and it is about to get a hell of a lot worse, that much seems clear and when the brain drain starts in the US, whatever is left there will not be suitable or liveable, that too is a clear consequence. And it was not rocket science. When you spend more than you collect, when you spend more than you have, this happens and it is happening now and the superrich were never part of any solution, their spending and their own tax system was, and it has been clearly out there since 1999. 

And when you wonder why I mentioned the USS Zumwalt? Well Yesterday we got “With political and economic stakes possibly riding on a defense project that saw a 17% cost overrun from $12 billion to $14 billion and the number of vessels being dropped from 32 to only three, besides a raft of nagging flaws in the overtly advanced system, the USS Zumwalt series of warships will not be scrapped” three overpriced dinghy’s and they are about to refit them for “Advanced Gun System (AGS) will be replaced by another defining weapon of our times – hypersonic missiles.“ A collection of ships, not a decade old will face billions in cost for refit, its stealth hull no longer doing what it was designed to do. On the other hand, I designed a weapon to sink it for a mere $250,000 per deployment, so who was stupid enough to sign that contract at $14,000,000,000 per vessels setting the stage from 32 ships to a mere three of them? You really think the super rich were the problem or these overspending politicians with their heads in the clouds? Someone OK’ed spending $14,000,000,000 on something that never properly worked and they are about to spend more. 

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The bad track

I am optionally on the wrong track, yet it is not an accident, it is an intentional choice I make. You see, we see too many ‘populist’ settings going on and I am starting to wonder if we are on the wrong track. Now, most of us are clear. The war in the Ukraine is wrong, Russia started this and there needs to be repercussions. Some have taken to confiscate whatever they could that is owned by Russian Oligarchs (weirdly enough I see almost no residence confiscations in London). Yachts and all other possessions are available. I have mixed feelings. Those with clear support to the Russian government and what is happening now is clear. The rest makes me wonder and for some reason the AP article ‘Fleeing sanctions, oligarchs seek safe ports for superyachts’ (at https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-vladimir-putin-boris-johnson-europe-united-states-10a82777a3b4a6ccafc38c223b659a03) something woke up. It was the quote ““We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets,” President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, addressing the oligarchs. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”” So, please explain to me (with evidence) those ‘ill-begotten gains’? It is a serious question. In this specific case we see Alisher Usmanov a metals magnate and early investor in Facebook. So how much did Facebook make him? Is that ill-begotten? There are two trains of thoughts. The first is that we see a new McCarthy mindset starting, which is their choice, but let’s be honest about it. The second track is that the US is so bankrupt that it is now in a stage to confiscate whatever it can to survive. I am not siding with Alisher Usmanov. And if he has done wrong, fine. But in that case this article was a piss poor job and then some. He was also one of the initial people connected to Mail.ru, so he seems to be a smart cookie who got involved with IT projects when it had the greatest impact, nothing ill begotten, merely good timing. Now, this does not mean that I am right, or that they are wrong. There is too much that I do not know. But this comes across as a legalised form of ‘Tax the rich’ which is now transformed into ‘confiscate whatever the rich has’ a democrat party BS approach. So what will happen when it is suddenly the wealth of Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Sergei Brin, Larry  Page, Tim. Cook and Jeff Bezos dealing with the bills the American government cannot deal with because they refused to clean house for over two decades? 

The AP does give us at the end “But actually seizing the behemoth boats could prove challenging. Russian billionaires have had decades to shield their money and assets in the West from governments that might try to tax or seize them”, which is fair enough. I am still in the mindset that SOME oligarchs should pay, not sure if all should, but I do admit I really do not know any of them and the media cannot be trusted, they are all on the populist track. OK, not all, but way to many of them are. We can consider that Roman Abramovich was either good or bad, I do not know. Too be honest, I never cared for football (read: soccer) so I am a little out of touch there. But as far as I can tell, everything Roman Abramovich did was to ensure the stage of Chelsea and it’s continuation. We can boast that giving the sale of Chelsea to Ukraine is a political push (the man is a politician after all) and a few other sides as well, and there perhaps his deception worked. Because I personally believe that the man is a soccer nut trying to preserve Chelsea. Does that make him evil? I personally do not think so. I also understand that some policies will hurt the good and the bad, but there is an increased feeling that the US is doing it for other reasons and as the media have no given us a really good stage of where all these funds go, we should wonder what is going on. 

I am not stating that what is done is wrong, but I am wondering why certain things were done and WHERE these funds are going to. Is that wrong? So I might be on the wrong track, but it is mainly because no one is properly illuminating the right track and the media are all about ‘the quote’ but are less about the clear explanation. I merely looked at two people, the US has a list of 96 oligarchs. I reckon there are clearly a few super pro-Putin people there, and we get it, it will rain on the good and the bad alike, but it seems that the media has a lot to make up for, especially when it comes to properly informing us, because that lack set me on the track I am on now.

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