Dreams of a Trillion: Childhood Ambitions to Buffets Billions

By Sarnaa Archie

$2 trillion dollars. That’s how much money I wanted to make when I was 6 years old. Why? Because I heard on the news that that’s how much the national debt was and that my personal share was about $10,000. (What I’d owe if I had to pay just my portion.) And I wanted to pay off everybody’s share. You know, give you all a clean slate. I was a philanthropic kid.

This will sound unrelated. But I promise you it isn’t.

You’re going to die.

When you do you’ll owe taxes. How much I don’t know. It depends on a number of factors like how much you have when you die and how much you leave behind. This sounds obvious. But nothing in tax is: these could be two totally different numbers depending on how you’ve arranged your affairs.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffet’s vast $100 billion fortune is mostly tied up in thousands of claim checks known as stocks. Money of a different sort, and in a certain system like ours, is better than cash in some ways. It’s Supermoney. He plans to leave most of this supermoney to various foundations.

By doing so, he will avoid a huge tax bill of about $50 billion. But this isn’t his main reason. For one, he’ll be dead and why would he care about a tax bill?

I don’t think he does. Or at least the idea of paying it isn’t repulsive, it's just if you get to choose what to do with it and can afford to put together a plan, maybe you should.

While Buffett’s billions would drop into the vast ocean of the federal budget, it's just a pinprick on the skin of the colossal $34 trillion debt monster we’ve created. The money will be spread from defense and healthcare to paying a small portion of the debt. His contribution won’t help expand these services, improve how they’re run, or help the country do better by any measurable margin.

In other words, if his money goes in the big swirl of the U.S. budget it won’t make a dent to “make the world a better place.”

Warren is more concerned about how his money would be used by the government than about having a huge tax bill. After all, he has made a fun life in the business of allocating capital (telling money where to go), and why should death change that?

It doesn’t have to.

His last allocation decision, encased in his will and probably various trusts, is to ensure that 99% of his $100+ billion dollar fortune be used to support the organizations and causes that the government (for both good and bad reasons) might never pay for—things can be helped by a little non-politically motivated money like lessening the number of nuclear weapons in the world, expanding access to quality education, family planning, eradicating malaria, agriculture, and reducing the hardship of being poor.

Whatever your opinion is of these things' importance (or non-importance) is irrelevant. It’s his money, and he is availing himself of the option afforded to every American. The option to tell his money where to go, even in death. Because here’s the simple tax sentiment that governs the whole system: “Either you put it to work or we will.” Signed, Uncle Sam.