Just made my annual trek to Omaha to attend the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting. It may sound crazy, listening to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger answer questions for five hours, but for me it's a philosophical tune-up not only from an investment perspective, but also from an economic, political, intellectual, and social standpoint.
Similar to last year, here's a summary of what I consider a few highlights of this year's meeting:
On the company movie and celebrity sightings: Board member Bill Gates was there, as was U2 lead singer Bono. The movie included skits with Jimmy Buffett and the cast of Glee.
On Buffett's health: Buffett said he feels terrific. Munger jokingly (as usual) said he resents all of the attention Buffett has been getting after his recent Stage 1 prostate cancer diagnosis - Munger claimed he probably has as much prostate cancer, he just never gets tested for it!
On energy: While natural gas prices are at historically now levels due to increased supply, Munger said it was idiotic to be extracting so much of that finite resource from the earth. He said we should be using other sources that were more abundant. He also said the energy independence is one of the stupidest things he'd ever heard of - we should be importing and using up other countries' resources and keeping ours as a reserve. Had we adopted this philosophy decades ago we'd be a lot better off now.
On SuperPACs: Buffett noted he could probably advance his political causes through SuperPAC donations, but he would never do that. Both he and Munger agreed the Citizens United ruling was bad for the country, allowing a few wealthy folks to have undo influence. And Buffett flat-out said he didn't want to see democracy go in that direction.
On the so-called Buffett Rule on taxing the very rich: Buffett reminded everyone he proposal isn't an attempt to balance the budget, but simple a matter of tax fairness to make sure lower income people don't pay a rate higher than the rich. He said the 400 highest income people in the U.S. averaged $250 million per year, and of those, 140 or so paid taxes of 15% or less. So the Buffett Rule wouldn't even impact most of the super-rich, and those it would impact would be just fine. And yes, it would also raise a few billion per year of tax revenue.
On the so-called Buffett Rule #2: A question from a shareholder's claims his 84-year old father would invest in Berky if it were not for Buffett's tax philosophy. Among other things, Buffett said it sounded like the guy ought to invest in Fox!
No comments:
Post a Comment