Pete Peterson on Giving Away $1 Billion

http://www.newsweek.com/id/200075/?gt1=43002

by imgabe • 17 years ago

55 28 17 years ago

dschobel• 17 years ago

Some incisive social criticism but short on details, even philosophical ones, about what's going to make his foundation any different from the thousands which exist today.

k0mplex• 17 years ago

A bit more detail on HOW he's going to deal with said fiscal issues would have been welcome.

stuff4ben• 17 years ago

If you, like me, were wondering what the Peter G. Peterson Foundation supports, look here: http://www.pgpf.org/about/faq/

I would have appreciated more information from the article on what the 1 Billion dollars was going to be used for.

jimbokun• 17 years ago

That's probably the single best summary of the fundamentals of U.S. fiscal problems I've seen. I will keep this in mind to point people to when questions about government debt come up.

If you need to sum up the U.S. debt crisis in a single sentence, I would go with:

"This staggering amount breaks down to a $483,000 burden on every American household, or a $184,000 burden on every man, woman, child and newborn in this country."

It really sucks that each of my kids is already $184,000 in the hole, through no fault of their own.

invisible3• 17 years ago

Except for the extraordinary fact that a single person can accumulate 1billion (which is probably at least 184x more than most of us will have).

The scale of debt should be applied equally to the scale of wealth, if we're going to go that route.

Staggering figure nonetheless...

bwh2• 17 years ago

I won $10k of that $1 billion a few months ago. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation and mtvU hosted a video game design contest and I won. You can play the game at http://debtski.com

It's a game about personal fiscal responsibility. At the time, I didn't realize how much press the game would get, but it picked up traction pretty quickly. The highlight for me was when the game was a featured story on the Yahoo! homepage for ~45 minutes.

cpr• 17 years ago

Funny how it's mostly people who are wealthy who are calling for higher taxes. It won't really hurt them.

Guilt, anyone?

ibsulon• 17 years ago

"A: Pete has put his money where his mouth is. If the necessary reforms are adapted to address this problem, Pete will certainly see his own taxes raised. A proponent of fiscal discipline for decades and co-founder of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition in 1992, he believes the wealthy should pay higher taxes and forego government-subsidized benefits they don't need."

From what I've seen, the self-made billionaires don't mind the extra tax. Buffet doesn't, Gates doesn't. It's the millionaires, those still trying to put together their nest egg, they are the ones who are worried about taxes.

cma2• 17 years ago

I'm sure he is pretty agnostic about the future of the tax code after he, as a hedge fund manager, already avoided even the level of taxes you or I would pay:

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/pm120/

The ordinary arguments for capital gains taxes don't apply when it isn't even your capital.

edw5192• 17 years ago

"...my mind was still sharp and my energy was good...My schedule had too many blank spots. I was liberated. I was free. But I was joyless."

Another way to get back some joy would be to share yourself along with your money. Many people here aren't really interested in your money (well, some of us anyway), but I bet almost everyone is interested in you. How did you do it? What do you believe? What advice would you give? Probably most of all, what do you do to stay sharp at 81? Inquiring hackers want to know.

mattobrien2• 17 years ago

He was one of the top guys at Blackstone. They are a private equity group. Their stock has gone down 80% since they IPOed. He was lucky that he cashed out when he did. Getting rich buying companies with borrowed money, and then unloading them on somebody else was the ultimate bubble business. Now that the credit bubble has burst, existing private equity has died. They're left with companies with enormous debt burdens that no one wants - think Sam Zeller and the Chicago Tribune company. I don't think Blackstone has sold a company since 2007. I'm not sure there are any lessons to extrapolate from this.

edw5192• 17 years ago

Thanks, Matt. That's enough for me. Ticket closed.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

Lesson: Where there are losers, there are winners.

ryanwaggoner3• 17 years ago

Wow...that's awesome, and I'm especially excited about the mission of his foundation. That said, this really bugged me:

Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about seeing Joseph Heller at a wealthy hedge-fund manager's party at a beach house in the Hamptons. Casting his eye around the luxurious setting, Vonnegut said, "Joe, doesn't it bother you that this guy makes more in a day than you ever made from Catch-22?" "No, not really," Heller said. "I have something that he doesn't have: I know the meaning of enough."

I hate stuff like that. Heller wasn't giving up 90% of his possessions and living in a shack eating beans and rice, which would be "enough" for many people in the world. It's all relative, ultimately. Just because someone with wealth chooses to live what you consider to be an opulent lifestyle doesn't mean they don't know what enough is. Billionaires have such a staggering amount of wealth that they can give 95% of it away and still live an incredibly comfortable and extravagant lifestyle. I like to think about Gates and Buffett here, both of whom will ultimately probably give away over $100 billion, but who both live very comfortable lifestyles, Gates much more so than Buffett, but even Buffett flies around in a private jet.

/rant

pbz• 17 years ago

Would it make you happier if they would give it all up and become homeless?

ryanwaggoner3• 17 years ago

Nope...it would make me happy if people stopped judging the extravagance of other people's lifestyles according to their own arbitrary guidelines.

chrismealy• 17 years ago

Pete Peterson is a Wall Streeter who's spending millions trying to convince people that Social Security is in crisis (it's not) and that we should privatize it. Giving a billion dollars to promote the prosperity of future Wall Streeters ain't charity.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/iousa-failed-scare-...

mattobrien2• 17 years ago

Amen.

Anyone who talks about future deficits and doesn't talk about healthcare costs isn't serious. Social Security will be more or less fine with some combination of tax increases and/or benefit reduction (i.e. raising retirement age). But this New Yorker piece makes clear that healthcare costs are skyrocketing - not because of Medicare or private insurance, but because doctors are going out of control, without any noticeable increase in quality of care: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...

But there's nothing in it for Wall Street if we constrain healthcare costs, so Peterson will go back to shilling for Social Security privatization.

akikuchi• 17 years ago

Please read the article before commenting on what it does or does not talk about: "the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded entitlements and promises, ... the metastasizing health-care costs, our energy gluttony. These structural deficits are unsustainable."

Also, I would be wary of any analysis of a situation as complex as US health care that lays blame 100pct on "out of control doctors."

madair• 17 years ago

This is phony. He won't say what his money is going for, because that would be a big embarrassment. People who are not libertarians should look closely at what he supports and rue the day that he gave $1 Billion toward making the poor poorer.

http://www.pgpf.org/issues/

siculars• 17 years ago

best quote from the article:

"Our representatives, unlike our Founding Fathers, see politics as a career. As a result, they are focused not on the next generation, but on the next election."

cma2• 17 years ago

Here's an interesting debate between Dean Baker and Diane Rogers of the Concord Coalition (funded by Peterson): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5055039736979442205...

Baker has some pretty good criticism.

Pete Peterson on Giving Away $1 Billion

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