Warren Buffett: Trickle-Down Economics Don’t Work
billionaire investor Warren Buffett has told ABC News that the rich should be paying a lot more in taxes.
Warren Buffett: “I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.”
“The rich are always going to say that, you know, ‘Just give us more money, and we’ll go out and spend more, and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you.’ But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.”
As gold prices go up, forests are coming down
A worldwide growth in the price of gold has accelerated the pace of deforestation in some of the most pristine parts of the Peruvian Amazon, where miners are cutting down trees in order to extract the valuable natural resource.
From 2003 to 2009, found a new study, the rate of deforestation in two gold-mining areas increased six-fold alongside record-setting leaps in the international price of gold. During one two-year period, as gold prices climbed steadily, forests disappeared at a rate of 4.5 American football fields a day from one of the two sites.
from 2003 to 2009, the images showed a loss of more than 6,600 hectares (16,000 acres) to make way for gold mining activity. That was more than was cut down over the same period to make way for settlements in the area. And the trend paralleled a meteoric rise in the price of gold, the researchers report today in the journal PLoS One.
Koch will decide the ruler
Writing in the Nation, Mark Ames and Mike Elk reveal that Koch Industries mailed a letters to 50,000 employees instructing them on who to vote for in the 2010 midterm elections. The Koch packet given to employees included candidate names, a letter from a Koch lobbyist, and a right-wing screed from the company and the Washington Examiner, an outlet owned by Phil Anschutz, a billionaire who is close to the Koch family. (View a copy of the packet here.)