A more apt analogy would be, if you're for a war, why don't you enlist? But lots of people in favor of wars do just that. What Buffett is saying is essentially, "Let's institute a draft." Lots of wars have had that, too, of course—which is not necessarily a good thing.
Of course, if there were a US draft (again), there might be fewer American troops overseas, and more protest against the wars we do have. [Disclosure: about 48 years ago, I tore up my draft card and mailed it back to the draft board]
He donated all of it. Whatever you got isn't that interesting.
You know, I've never had a problem with the income taxes that I pay. They're taken out of my check and I work with what's left. I never think "oh man, they're taking my money" any more than I think "oh man, I totally deserve to win the lottery".
I do think there's something about earning money through investments that makes paying taxes "feel" more like your money is being taken away from you. It's not automatically deducted. It's not there every week. Sometimes you lose money. You have to pay it all at once. Taxes are not part of the mental calculation of how much you made on that sweet stock investment. I think that's WHY the rates are lower. People just feel like the rates SHOULD be lower. But it's a psychological effect. When I look at the economic effects of the current tax scheme on a large scale, it seems to me that this kind of benefit is just a giant tax dodge.
Let's say that the tax rate is structured in a way that the cost of doing productive "work" with your capital is 30%, but the tax rate for just shuffling the money around through a bunch of investment vehicles is %15. Well, you've suddenly got a free %15 to play around with. And if you only need to return %10 to be considered a pretty good investment, then it seems like you really can't fail as long as you've already got enough money to play a different game than the rest of us. But those guys are already orbital, and the rest of us can never achieve escape velocity. I'd prefer to not live in a cyberpunk future where the rich get their own orbital gardens and the rest of us have to live in the ruins they left behind.
The main reasons capital gains are taxed at a lower rate are:
1) inflation (if you buy a stock for $100 and sell it 10y later for $120, you actually lost money, at least for every 10y period I know about)
2) invested dollars have a higher multiplier for economic activity than wages earned and then spent, so raising capital gains rates hurt the economy more ("have higher deadweight losses") than wage taxes. Poll taxes and consumption (VAT, particularly) taxes are even better, though.
3) people who have enough money to make meaningful investments tend to vote more reliably than people who earn mainly wage income, and also are in a better position to donate to political campaigns.
For the same reason that if someone votes for or advocates for a war, we don't say... "well, if you want to fight the (Iranians, or whatever), then go buy a gun and fight them."
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader why that is an absurd argument.
