are tough. fill hand throw my is fantastic. when you look at buying bad nets and all the different aid activities. and most countries, as they have squeezed their budgets, have cut back on those things. a few like the united kingdom have gone up despite big budget cuts. it’s hard tore raise money now than it’s ever been. joe, i know you have a question too. based on something warren said earlier i want to address it to mr. gates. warren pointed out basic science and money that goes into sciences is directing towards extending longevity rather than figuring out a way to pay for it. and it’s very expensive. a lot of things we have come up with, whether drugs that cost $200,000, $300,000 a year, organ transplants, we can’t afford for everyone to live forever. are we not funding this proper? just as a throwaway, ray kerswall thinks we may be able to do something in terms of living much longer than we live right now. how are we going to do this? if that ratio stays the same it’s all okay. your contribution is scaling up with the extra length of that retirement period. the other thing that’s interested, the global burden of disease is the chronic diseases where you’re sick but staying alive, like a par kin son’s or diabetes or acute disease like lung cancer where you don’t live very long. the rise is chronic disease is a big challenge. and we need to get our innovation, risk takers. we need big incentives to go after chronic diseases. only by having lots of solutions there, do you avoid the reduction in the cue, which gives you longevity, throwing things completely out of whack. overall, i’m optimistic. i’m not optimistic like kerswell. 2045. immortality by 2045. i don’t know what we do with the brain. that makes it a little more difficult. we might make it. i’m optimistic. but it’s going to be expensive if no one dies. warren? bill and i talked a lot the last couple of the years. the incentives are not to bring down costs. they are actually, not perhaps by accident but they are actually going to produce more and more increased costs. right. somebody goes to work on a solution on a given problem the cost of that solution is not really part of the calculation, or any significant it’s just getting the answer no matter what the cost is. we want that but we can’t pay for it. that’s the problem. that’s the problem with it. andrew, you had a question too. the last hour, bill, we talked to warren a little bit on tax policy. there is a talk on capping charitable deduction. i want your thoughts on what you ink the impact of that will be. if something like that existed, how might it have changed the way you approached your philanthropy? and the same for warren. well, the answer is knowing when to change when i do in terms of charity. if you give away 90% of your money the deduction is not beneficial to you. in any meaningful way. i think having an estate ta where giving to a foundation is exempt from that. and having charitable deduction is a very good thing. limiting it to 28% rate, i don’t think will have a dramatic impact. it probably would have a slight negative impact. but i don’t think that would be super dramatic. if they were going the get rid of that deduction altogether, i think that could change behavior and would be unfortunate. well, yeah. in the case of bill and myself, i got to use less than 1% of what i gave away in terms of charitable deduction. less than 1% showed up on the income return. bill and i — mine is $10 billion or $11 billion. 98 expired unused. 99% of mine expired. anyway, it’s not a factor. i would say this. of the people at the high end, i don’t think it would make a lot of difference. i think in the intermediate of wealth and income it could make a fair amount of difference.
Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman; and Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, chairman & CEO, discuss the need to implement changes in the nation’s immigration law. Also, Gates and Buffett weigh in on the debate over the “fairness” of online sales tax.
