A very interesting thing (at least in my mind) happened yesterday. On the right rail there is this section called ‘Popular Posts’ that shows posts here that are popular on that day.
I saw the budget post on where the government gets its money from float to the top and thought that something was broken. Why would such an old post suddenly become popular?
When I investigated further I saw that someone had shared that post on Reddit India and the traffic burst was a result of that. The comments there are very interesting and quite different from the comments you’d expect on OneMint, and the one thing that struck me about that comment thread was why hasn’t anyone raised the point that the revenue from income taxes are quite low as a percentage of total revenues? Since tax was the one thing people were talking about the most.
They say that only about 3% of Indians pay income taxes, and I’m sure everyone agrees that the salaried class share the burden of income taxes disproportionately, then why aren’t people complaining about that?
In an American context, Warren Buffett has been talking about the rich paying a lot less in taxes than the rest of the American public and he talks about that yet again in a recent interview he did.
I’m embedding the video below as it is quite entertaining as well as educational (although not new for anyone who has been following this discussion for long).
Here is the link to the complete show if you want to watch the whole episode.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.in/2012/11/a-master-of-tax-avoidance.html is an interesting view on Buffet’s take.
It is laughable BS in my opinion. No wonder he had to turn off comments on his blog.
I was going to say the same, but I thought I’ll be civil and abstain. :)If someone can save taxes, they should absolutely do it. Its a moral responsibility to oneself to save taxes. 🙂 Its not Warren’s fault if one can save taxes by doing something permitted by the law. And, Warren has been saying for many years now, that these rules should be changed. What more do people want from him? That he voluntarily pay more taxes? I’m shocked that such an argument is coming from Mankiw. An economist should know better!
Yeah, you’re right, I was too crude.