Eric Fry seems to think that some billionaires should come with warning labels:

[Warren] Buffett knows investing, no doubt about it. He’s an expert’s expert. But Buffett also knows how to make sure the government’s butter lands on at least one side of his bread, if not both. He’s an expert’s expert.

Both activities are perfectly legal, but only one of them is perfectly disgusting.

— Eric Fry, “Bashing Buffett … Once Again with Feeling”, The Daily Reckoning, March 29, 2012.

Fry is making reference to Buffett’s public lament that he hasn’t been paying enough income tax:

Mr. Buffett must feel just awful about this injustice. If only he had discovered it earlier, he could have paid tens of billions of dollars more in taxes during his lifetime. And, gee willickers, he could have told all his mega-rich friends about his great discovery so that they, too, could have paid tens of billions of dollars more in taxes.

Golly gee, isn’t that just the way life is? You always discover the best stuff after it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s just too darn bad that Buffett and his mega-rich friends had already amassed their mega-billions of dollars during the “unfair” tax regime of the last two or three decades before Buffett discovered how unfair it was.

But, shucks, you can’t turn back the clock. So despite Buffett’s profound regret, he will simply have to keep all those billions of dollars that the IRS did not permit him to contribute to the US government.

Gee whiz…life just ain’t fair sometimes. You try to be magnanimous with the US government and the IRS just won’t let you. Hey, but at least you can publicly proscribe for others the identical high-tax regime that you methodically and assiduously avoided throughout a career spanning several decades. — Ibid.

For the select few, seven million smackers is pocket lint:

Buffett paid $6.9 million in taxes on his 2010 personal income of $39.9 million dollars — or 17.4%. But he paid zero personal taxes on his portion — $2.9 billion — of Berkshire Hathaway’s net income. (Of course Berkshire paid corporate tax, but that fact is not germane to the discussion of personal taxes that Buffett addressed in his article last year).

In other words, even if you bumped the personal income tax all the way up to 100%, and literally confiscated every cent of Buffett’s direct personal income, the effective tax rate on the totality of his increased wealth in 2010 would have been only 1.4%!

So you see how easy it is to be a do-gooding, “fair-share-paying” billionaire? — Ibid.

But Mr. Buffett still complains the tax system lacks fairness — unless, of course, it’s rigged in his favor:

Buffett’s “tax fairness” ideas — focusing as they do on personal income, dividends and capital gains taxes — would leave Buffett, himself, virtually unscathed. That’s because:

1) His personal income represents less than 2% of his annual wealth accumulation;

2) Berkshire Hathaway has never paid a dividend in its history;

3) Buffett, himself, has no intention of generating any capital gains because he has no intention of selling a single share of Berkshire Hathaway.

Tellingly, Buffett’s proposals exclude any mention of estate taxes or of disallowing certain deductions for those he calls the “mega-rich.” These exclusions are no accident.

When disclosing his multi-billion-dollar gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in 2006, Buffett established three conditions, the second of which was that the foundation “must continue to satisfy legal requirements qualifying my gift as charitable and not subject to gift or other taxes.” — Ibid.

While some people have regarded a tax on personal income to be immoral (even going so far as calling it the root of all evil), Buffett’s main complaint is that there isn’t enough of it.

To judge from the company he keeps, Buffett is a big fan of big government — and the feeling seems to be mutual.