Putting off what you like doing for retirement is like saving sex for old age…

-Warren Buffett

What Warren said about the need to raise taxes on the Rich is wrong.

For starters, check out this report from the Treasury from two years ago.

DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY
Office of Public Affairs
March 2, 2005
FACT SHEET:
Who Pays the Most Individual Income Taxes?
The individual income tax is highly progressive – a small group of higher-income taxpayers pay most of the individual income taxes each year.

• In 2002 the latest year of available data, the top 5 percent of taxpayers paid more thanone-half (53.8 percent) of all individual income taxes, but reported roughly one-third(30.6 percent) of income.
• The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 33.7 percent of all individual income taxes in2002. This group of taxpayers has paid more than 30 percent of individual incometaxes since 1995. Moreover, since 1990 this group’s tax share has grown faster than their income share.
• Taxpayers who rank in the top 50 percent of taxpayers by income pay virtually all individual income taxes. In all years since 1990, taxpayers in this group have paid over 94 percent of all individual income taxes. In 2000, 2001, and 2002, this grouppaid over 96 percent of the total.

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I would guess that most of you have heard of Private Mortgage Lending or PML, but unless you are involved in it, I am willing to bet that you did not realize how large of a market that it has become, nor just how lucrative it is for the players involved in it.

While this is a hidden underground market, it is estimated that it is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It is big enough that the intrepid Billionaire Richard Branson of Virgin fame just started a company to service it. Think there is no money in it? I will have a more detailed story on that shortly. (more…)