Charlie Munger Quotes About Taxes

Quotes about: Taxes

• The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find some things you can just sit with.

  Charlie Munger

  Giving, Advantage, Enormous

• We don't have any miraculous way of avoiding taxes at Wesco and Berkshire.

  Charlie Munger

  Way, Taxes, Avoiding

  Charlie Munger's comments on Wesco and Berkshire Hathaway at the 2001 Wesco Financial Annual Meeting, www.tilsonfunds.com. May 2, 2001.

• Even if you assume that the whole economy would work better had we never had double taxation, having the envy and resentment of the richest paying low or no taxes screams of injustice. You have to have a fair system.

  Charlie Munger

  Envy, Taxation, Resentment

  Charlie Munger's advice on life and other at the 2003 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, www.tilsonfunds.com. May 3, 2003.

• Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. This is such a no-brainer.

  Charlie Munger

  Saving, Taxes, Accounts

  "4 Steps To Getting Rich From Warren Buffett's Right-Hand Man" by Chuck Saletta, www.businessinsider.com. May 31, 2013.

• If you're going to buy something which compounds for 30 years at 15% per annum and you pay one 35% tax at the very end, the way that works out is that after taxes, you keep 13.3% per annum. In contrast, if you bought the same investment, but had to pay taxes every year of 35% out of the 15% that you earned, then your return would be 15% minus 35% of 15%-or only 9.75% per year compounded. So the difference there is over 3.5%. And what 3.5% does to the numbers over long holding periods like 30 years is truly eye-opening.

  Charlie Munger

  Eye, Years, Differences

• I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It's totally outrageous.

  Charlie Munger

  Party, Thinking, Ideas

• ...in terms of business mistakes that I've seen over a long lifetime, I would say that trying to minimize taxes too much is one of the great standard causes of really dumb mistakes. I see terrible mistakes from people being overly motivated by tax considerations. Warren and I personally don't drill oil wells. We pay our taxes. And we've done pretty well, so far. Anytime somebody offers you a tax shelter from here on in life, my advice would be don't buy it.

  Charlie Munger

  Mistake, Oil, Long

• I talked to one accountant, a very nice fellow who I would have been glad to have his family marry into mine. He said, "What these other accounting firms have done is very unethical. The [tax avoidance scheme] works best if it's not found out [by the IRS], so we only give it to our best clients, not the rest, so it's unlikely to be discovered. So my firm is better than the others." [Laughter] I'm not kidding. And he was a perfectly nice man. People just follow the crowd...Their mind just drifts off in a ghastly way.

  Charlie Munger

  Laughter, Nice, Men

• You'll better understand the evil when top audit firms started selling fraudulent tax shelters when I tell you that one told me that they're better [than the others] because they only sold [the schemes] to their top-20 clients, so no-one would notice.

  Charlie Munger

  Evil, Shelter, Clients

• The lawyers have escaped most criticism [and undeservedly so]. The tax shelters [were approved by lawyers, who got paid huge commissions to do so] and every miscreant had a high-falutin' lawyer at his side. Why don't more law firms vote with their feet and not take clients who have signs on them that say, "I'm a skunk and will be hard to handle?" I've noticed that firms that avoid trouble over long periods of time have an institutional process that tunes bad clients out. Boy, if I were running a law firm, I'd want a system like that because a lot of firms have a lot of bad clients.

  Charlie Munger

  Running, Boys, Law

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