I guess George Soros must have stolen all those jets.
Believe it or not, one can actually support policies which don’t directly benefit oneself.
I don’t know what else to tell you: they aren’t. I’ll grant you that it’s sometimes amusing to see liberals caricatured as greedy poor people and as stingy, know-it-all snobs at the same time, but at some point we have to acknowledge they can’t both be universally true. I am sure that urban poor people vote Democratic at a significant clip, and I’m sure that the rural poor are overwhelmingly Republican. The main divide between the parties seems to be urban and rural. It’s not high income vs. low income.
Let me ask you -
Do you believe that Democrats in the top 1% of income pay less of their income as a percentage than middle-class Americans?
If so, do you believe that they want to change the tax code so that they pay more?
Then why is it tax-deductible?
Regards,
Shodan
Let me ask you -
Are you randomly throwing out new arguments instead of responding to my point that your “response to the OP” was a response to an argument that he spent three-fifths of his OP stressing he was not making?
If so, would you not do that?
Let’s back up and take a look at the big picture.
Why do we need candidates to disclose their tax returns? So we can see where they get their income from so we can judge them better. For instance, if a candidate gets all his money from BP dividends and who advocates letting BP off the hook for its oil spills, we as voters need to know that.
Similarly, if a candidate claims “not to be a lobbyist” but who made over $300,000 for his services as a “historian” and “Not a lobbyist” we voters need to know that the candidate is telling us a whopper.
No, see, Newt hired a lawyer with expertise in lobbying to tell him how to lobby without being a lobbyist. Therefore he wasn’t a lobbyist.
If Romney wants to defend the carried interest rule in the fall then more power to him.
Your arguments towards me are nonsensical, and I haven’t said anything remotely like this. So rather than indulge you by treating you as if you were actually arguing something and continuing to stink up this thread, I created a pit thread instead.
And so the disciples said to him, “Rabbi, is it just that we should pay taxes?” And he replied: “Show me the bill that is used to pay the taxes.” And so they handed him a dollar bill. And he said “Whose face is this on the bill?”, and they replied “Washington’s”. And so he said “Render unto Washington that which is Washington’s, and render unto God that which is God’s.”.
Taxes aren’t the government taking your money by force. Taxes are the government taking back the government’s money. Money isn’t a fundamentally real thing; it’s just a construct of society. Society as a whole can do whatever it likes with it, and the body that makes decisions on behalf of society is what we call the government. They have the right to set whatever tax rate they want, since it’s their money to begin with. If the government wanted to set the rate at 99%, they could. It would be counterproductive, but it would not be immoral.
Are you serious?
First of all a LOT of things are deductible. My home mortgage interst is deductible, paying my mortgage is not a proxy for taxes.
At the very most we can say that government wants to encourage charitable giving so they subsidize your giving to the tune of your marginal tax rate.
Yes. The expected value of the investment, before taxes, is 0. (.5 *0 + .5 *200K) = $100K - $100K = 0. So, whoever makes this investment is a nitwit.
As mentioned, you can deduct losses from other gains, and even carry them over. As a survivor of the bubble, I know about this.
Here is a site which lists capital gains rates since 1988. You’ll note that the rates during the Internet boom were far higher than they are today. Somehow people managed to be able to invest even so.
Government also forces you not to murder, not to rape, not to speed, and not to park in handicapped spots. Boo hoo.
Assuming that you are mildly interested in having an army to protect us from Communist Islamic zombies, how do you propose we pay for it? The government is using just as much force to extract the 1% to pay for that as to pay for welfare queens. Perhaps you would sell TV rights to the army reality show? Ask for good faith donations? Set up a Super PAC? Get from those freeloaders with no income?
BTW, your attempts at logic are making the baby Aristotle cry.
The notion that we must give a preferential tax rate to encourage investment is a crock. Equity investments are their own reward, returning much larger gains than bonds or saving accounts. What else are the wealthy going to do with the money they cannot spend fast enough? Stuff it under the mattress? Will they really settle for less than 1% interest if we don’t bribe them with their own low tax rate? The 15% capital gains rate does nothing to encourage investment, it just grows the deficit. If we are going to run government like a business, we should tax whatever the market will bear; any CEO will tell you leaving money on the table like that is irresponsible to the stockholders (that’s us!).
Warren Buffett:
In response to the charge that investors will stop working if they get taxed with a higher rate:
“I remember when capital gains were 40 percent, people didn’t go home at 3:00 in the afternoon and say, ‘I’m going to a movie, I’ve paid too much in taxes already.’”
NM…I see the comment was from Buffet looking at what you wrote. Could I get a link for that? I don’t see the average effective capital gains tax rate higher than 25% since the 50’s, so would be interested in what he meant there.
-XT
It’s all there in Voyager’s cite. As recently as 2003 if your marginal rate was 38.6% and you owned the asset for less than a year the rate was 38.6%.
Actually it looks like 40% is what it will revert to Jan 1 2013 for high-earners on short-term gains.
I’m glad to see that you recognize that I was correct - the government does force you to pay taxes, and jshore’s allegation to the contrary was nonsense.
Regards,
Shodan
The max capital gains rate (which seems to be what people usually give if they want to summarize the rate in a single number) was 39.9% in the late 70’s. I presume thats what he meant.
I assume you also rage about having to sleep every day or needing to eat and excrete.
Damn the Democrats for taking the unprecedented stance of taxing people. Damn them!111one