Buffett on Rose, Oct 1, 2008

¶ Beware of geeks with clever computer models: “I mean they had all these types from Wall Street, you know, and they had advanced degrees, and they look very alert, and they came with these — they came with these things that said gamma and alpha and sigma and all that. And all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas.”

¶ Taxes shouldn’t treat income from capital more favorably than income from labor: “I think it’s terrible for people in effect to say that income from investment should be taxed at a much lower rate than income from labor. … everybody likes to talk about how the top one percent pays this percent in income, but the income tax, we’ll say 1.3 trillion. The payroll taxes are over 900 billion. That 900 billion, that doesn’t come from me. I pay it on the first hundred thousand or something like that. But that comes from the people in my office.”