TRENTON — Warren Buffett can be hard to silence.

Gov. Chris Christie told the billionaire investor to shut up on national television last week, saying he was "tired of hearing about" his proposal to raise taxes on the country’s wealthiest earners.

"He should just write a check and shut up," the governor told CNN’s Piers Morgan. "If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check."

Not quite shutting up, Buffett — known as the "Oracle of Omaha" — spent more than an hour on CNBC Monday, and somewhere between oil prices and unemployment rates got around to Christie, describing the governor’s suggestion as endearing but naïve.

"It’s sort of a touching response to a $1.2 trillion deficit, isn’t it?" Buffett asked. "That somehow the American people will just all send in checks and take care of it?"

He said the federal government needs spending cuts and new tax revenue to tame the soaring deficit.

Noting that income inequality has grown drastically in the last decades, Buffett said he was shocked to see his secretary and other employees paying much higher tax rates than he does. Part of the solution, he said, is taking a bigger cut from top earners’ paychecks.

"The real problem we have is we’re taking in too little money and we’re spending too much, and that’s not going to be solved by voluntary contributions," he said.

Buffett’s suggestion, now part of President Obama’s budget plan, has made the billionaire a sort of black sheep among some chief executives, and a target for Republicans, including Christie and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

It is, Buffett says, the price he has to pay.

"If you’re into something where the Republicans tend to be on one side and the Democrats on the other side, all you do is you make half the people of the United States mad at you for coming out of the chute," he said.

The governor has been playing a high-stakes game of Whack-a-Mole over a millionaire’s tax, fighting Democrats with vetoes at every turn.