New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said last week that billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, who has called for the nation's wealthiest people to pay more taxes, should “just write a check and shut up.”
“I'm tired of hearing about it,” Mr. Christie told CNN's Piers Morgan in an interview that aired last Tuesday. “If he wants to give the government more money, he's got the ability to write a check,” Mr. Christie said. “Go ahead and write it.”
Mr. Christie, a 49-year-old first-term Republican known for a blunt and caustic style, has proposed a 10% income tax cut for every New Jersey resident.
Democrats who control the Legislature contend that his plan would favor the rich. A family with a $50,000 annual income would save $80 under his plan, while someone earning $1 million would save $7,200, they said.
Democrats “want you to be angry because your neighbor makes more than you do,” Mr. Christie said Wednesday at a town hall meeting in Palisades Park, N.J. “That's not the New Jersey I know, and it's not the America that I know.”
Mr. Buffett, the 81-year-old chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has urged Congress to raise taxes on millionaires to cut the U.S. deficit. In a New York Times Op-Ed last year, he wrote that his federal income tax bill was $6.94 million, or 17.4% of his taxable income, a lower rate than that paid by any of the other 20 employees in his Omaha, Neb., office.
Mr. Buffett, a Democrat, endured scorn from Republicans last year after he called the Tea Party approach to budget talks “insane” and proposed raising $500 billion by taxing the richest Americans.
President Barack Obama has called for a minimum rate of 30% for those with income of $1 million or more a year. The proposal has been dubbed “the Buffett Rule.”
Carrie Kizer, Mr. Buffett's assistant, didn't return an e-mail or telephone call seeking comment on Mr. Christie's statements.
Mr. Christie's past comments have brought him national attention. In October, he spurned calls to run for president and has endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination.
OTHER OUTBURSTS
Mr. Christie has called a lawmaker “numbnuts,” urged reporters to “take the bat out” on a 76-year-old legislator and described union leaders as “political thugs.”
The governor, who vetoed a bill to legalize gay marriage and wants it put to a popular vote instead, told its supporters last month that blacks would have been pleased to have their civil rights decided that way.
“People would have been happy with a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets of the South,” Mr. Christie told reporters Jan. 24 in Bridgewater, N.J.
He was accused of ignorance by leaders such as Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a veteran of the civil-rights movement who was beaten by Alabama state troopers. Mr. Lewis traveled to Trenton, N.J., to denounce Mr. Christie.
Jon Stewart, a New Jersey native and host of the satirical “Daily Show,” lampooned Mr. Christie last Tuesday night for his veto.
“I was very proud last Friday to say the state Legislature, the state where I grew up, voted to legalize gay marriage,” Mr. Stewart said. “Unfortunately, like most events in New Jersey, it was immediately thrown off course by a loud Italian guy.”
