But you don’t understand! This is a DEATH tax, probably for a death brought on by an OBAMACARE DEATH PANEL. And… and…, it hurts family farms. And… and… it destroys the good Christian Capitalist Moral Fiber of the Yooo-nited States of America (the government of which we despise, by the way).
The story of this staffer is a big dog-bites-man moment. As others have noted, he seems like a run of the mill scumbag who took his money while he could despite the fact that the only congressman he could find to hire him was from a party he didn’t personally fall in line with to begin with. No true believer.
If you’ve ever met any Hill staffers, this is common. I got invited to a GOP event during the odious GWB years. I went for the free food, fearing I’d be subjected to a lot of neocon ideologues. I needn’t have worried. The one thing that struck me was the impression that any one of these staffers would have crossed the aisle for an office that was five square feet bigger, or to become the junior assistant to the vice secretary of the subcommittee on energy administration. They skewed heavily toward the contemptible, which isn’t surprising when you consider what would make someone want to be a lackey to a generally-scummy politician. So this guy’s now a turncoat? Hardly newsworthy.
This is what makes it “double taxation,” which is how I rightly referred to it:
A corporation comes up with a good idea or product. As a result, it generates earnings and its stock appreciates. It pays takes on those earnings and appreciation.
Then the stockholder is asked to pay taxes reflective of the exact same event (the successful idea or product) that the corporation already paid for when he sells his appreciated stock. Ergo, double taxation.
You may think it’s a great idea (Hell, triple! Quadruple!), but it’s not not double taxation.
He’s not a “true believer,” so we can safely discount what he says, is that it? You have to drink the kool-aid to have any credibility? Mike Lofgren’s job was focused on defense and budget issues, he didn’t need to buy into the entire conservative agenda to do his job.
If you feel the GWB years were so odious, then what do you care if a staffer wants to call out the Republicans for their nihilism and cynicism?
When a business purchases raw materials, and creates a good for sale, at the time of sale (assuming the sale of said good creates profit for the company and the company does not possess the clout/lobbyist influence/tax attorney staffing to avoid it) taxation occurs.
When a consumer buys the good (created by the same event that allowed the good or purchase to be created from said raw materials), sales taxes are applied.
OMG Double Taxation!
Funny, that particular instance of double taxation seems to not generate as much vitriol among the conservatives that I have heard discuss the relationship between creation of goods and the profitable monetization of same.
In fact, I’d be willing to bet that consumption taxes are quite popular as a mechanism to raise revenue for national government among that particular cohort.
You’ll be glad to know that this is not my impression, then. My impression is that many on the right seem to bring up the proposition of value-added taxes as an acceptable revenue source, whereas income taxes and capital gains taxes are all but called treasonous, socialistic, communistic, naziist, and Kenyan.
Well it’s only fair that grad students should be counted twice in the stats, after all better educated people should have more votes than the non-college people!
Nothing’s wrong with it per se. As I noted above, advocating for double, or triple, or quadruple, taxation is fine, as a policy proposition. I don’t agree with it, but I recognize it as a policy.
The reason I brought it up was in response to vociferous criticism that there was no rationale other than favoring “the rich” for taxing capital gains or dividends at anything other than the marginal income tax rate. My point is that wages are in some sense “new” money, at least different enough to money that taxes have already been paid for (dividends, cap. gains) to be one plausible basis for treating cap gains different from wages (I anticipate and acknowledge the argument that your employer may have paid taxes itself, but it’s a little different because employee salaries offset to gross income).