Pilot Leaves Suicide Note Railing Against US Federal Tax Agency Before Flying into Building
THE TELEGRAPH: A pilot set fire to his house and then committed suicide by flying his small plane into a tax office in Texas.

Joseph Stack left a six-page suicide note in which he railed against the Internal Revenue Service, the US federal tax agency.

He wrote: "I am finally ready to end this insanity. Well, Mr Big Brother IRS man let's try something different. Take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

"There was a storm raging inside me. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We are brainwashed to believe there is freedom in this land."

In his suicide "manifesto," which he posted on his own website, Stack also railed against Wall Street bankers, the Catholic Church, President George W Bush and the health care system. >>> Nick Allen in Los Angeles | Thursday, February 18, 2010

Texas Plane Crash: Joseph Stack's Rambling Note Against America
THE TELEGRAPH: In his long, rambling suicide note Joseph Stack painted himself as a hard working American who was being exploited by a corrupt establishment and forced to hand over his retirement money in taxes.

Joseph Stack, the pilot of a small plane that crashed into an Austin office building. Photograph: The Telegraph
Stack complained that anyone who stood up for the principal of "no taxation without representation" was now labelled a "crackpot." He accused corporate leaders of being "thugs and plunderers" guilty of "gluttony and overwhelming stupidity" and politicians were "thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags."

He said the US health system was a "joke" and accused drug companies of "murdering tens of thousands of people a year" but his strongest words were reserved for the tax system.

Stack said: "Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand.

"The law requires a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing. If that's not duress then what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is." >>> Nick Allen in Los Angeles | Thursday, February 18, 2010

Buffett Attacks the Inequity of the US Tax System
TIMESONLINE: Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.

Speaking at a $4,600-a-seat fundraiser in New York for Senator Hillary Clinton, Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52 billion (£26 billion), said: “The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

Mr Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent. Mr Buffett told his audience, which included John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, and Alan Patricof, the founder of the US branch of Apax Partners, that US government policy had accentuated a disparity of wealth that hurt the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation. Buffett blasts system that lets him pay less tax than secretary (more) By Tom Bawden

Mark Alexander