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ABC's David Muir (subscription required) gave us the news that Stanley O'Neal, the boss of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, is expected to be fired, with a severance bonus of $200m, for leading his firm to an $8bn loss from mortgage investments gone sour, "the company's biggest quarterly loss in 93 years." Meanwhile, NBC's extended newshole allowed it to assign former anchor Tom Brokaw to a five-minute profile of Warren Buffett, "the Oracle of Omaha and the world's third richest man." Buffett is protesting the "fundamental injustice" of the tax system--not the income tax but the other taxes we pay. He surveyed 15 of his co-workers at his Berkshire Hathaway office and contrasted the bite they pay in taxes, mostly from the payroll tax, with his own, mostly through the capital gains tax. The office average was 33%; Buffett's was 18%. Concluded Brokaw: "Buffett has challenged--he has offered $1m to charity--any of the Forbes 400 richest people who can show that, on average, they pay a higher tax rate than their secretaries pay. So far he has had no takers."
And NBC's Josh Mankiewicz wondered why there is "a new class of professionals…whose titles are longer than their resumes." So he asked billionaire Donald Trump why corporate vice presidents proliferate. "I love handing people a vice presidency but keeping their salary down. I feel great if I can give somebody a title and not have to pay them for it." The brokerage Goldman Sachs has 6,500 vice presidents.
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