Rich Lowry: Warren Buffett Betrays His Country
Rich Lowry: Warren Buffett Betrays His Country
Note from Senior Management: National Review Editor-in-Chief
Rich Lowry takes on Warren Buffett's tax strategy in Politico. We
reprint here.
It must have been a bitter moment for President Barack Obama when he
got the news that his favorite economic guru not only doesn’t like
paying taxes but hates America.
Warren Buffett, whose eponymous rule was a staple of Obama’s 2012
reelection campaign, is underwriting Burger King’s proposed move to
Canada that the left is denouncing as practically the most dastardly
plot since the Rosenbergs helped the Soviets get the atomic bomb.
Burger King is acquiring the Canadian coffee and doughnuts chain Tim
Hortons in what is called a “corporate inversion.” At least that’s the
technical term for it. Obama and the left prefer to call it by names
usually reserved for spies and AWOL soldiers before they get a last
cigarette and a blindfold.
The practice of corporate inversion, or relocating overseas to avoid
the burden of U.S. taxes, offends the president’s sense of “economic
patriotism,” as he put it in a speech a few weeks ago. He referred to
firms that make this move as “corporate deserters” taking advantage of
an “unpatriotic tax loophole.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont, says companies like
Burger King are betraying America’s veterans, and “have absolutely no
loyalty to the people of the United States and our government.” Sen.
Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, has called for a boycott. Online
petitions are targeting the chain for its rank abandonment of the United
States.
This outpouring of patriotic fervor is something to behold,
especially from the same sort of people who used to think expecting a
politician to wear a flag lapel pin was a crudely nationalistic
imposition.
The left almost universally scorns the idea that a closely held
family business might have religious motivations — and was outraged by
the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision for this reason — yet believes
that enormous globe-bestriding corporations should have patriotic
feelings.
Burger King is owned, by the way, by a Brazilian private equity firm.
Its Brazilian patriotism should be in doubt, too, since it showed no
sign of sinking into a months-long funk after Germany crushed Brazil in
the World Cup semifinal.
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