I meant some DAY, not somebody. Gah. :smack:
Carry on.
Economists? I think you mean the crappy free-market hacks who teach at many state colleges. They oversimplify things & misapply Adam Smith.
Yep, that’s right, only two options: (i) invest in the U.S. stock market or (ii) don’t invest at all. You are a genius. :rolleyes:
Lots of things besides stock are taxed at the capital gains tax rate. For example (and with lots and lots of exceptions), gain on the sale of: mortgage-backed securities, other types of debt, partnership interests, real estate, etc. So lowering the tax rate on capital gains does not encourage ONLY investment in stocks.
Why is it necessary to encourage investment? Doesn’t the free market do that adequately by providing a return on investment? What alternative do investors have, stuff it in a mattress? And spending it all instead of investing it is just as powerful a stimulus to economy as lower taxes. The government achieves nothing by so called “encouragement”, except to gain the approval of the investor class for the party that passes such tax cuts. Sounds like a quid pro quo to me.
You know, when you say stuff like that about the Free Market, it goes on your permanent record.
Listening to the conservatives and the libertarians trying to distance themselves from the Bush Administration reminds me of an old saying: “Success has a thousand fathers, failure has but one.”
I always heard this as “failure is an orphan.”
Apropos this thread, I’ve always felt that loyalty to a political party–unless you yourself are a politician by trade–is embarrassing at best.
But anyway, if Nixon couldn’t doom the Republican Party, than clearly Dubya’s failures won’t either.
Our big problem is not Republican or Demorcrats per se, but Congress as an entity. They are not doing their jobs and haven’t done it in years. They spend uncontrollably, they continue to play the porkbarrel game knowing full well that we don’t have the funds to cover them, they’ve allowed Wall Street to run amouck, and protected the crooks and thieves who are supposed to be fiduciary stewards of their stockholders’ money and instead bankrupt their companies, putting honest people out of work while pocketing millions. And Congress not only allows it to happen without repercussions, but they bail them out with taxpayers’ money, knowing full well that those executives will reward them with a big, fat check. In short, they’ve fucked over their constitutents.
Do I care that capital gains are cut? No. Hell, I think it’s high time we Americans started withholding ALL of our taxes from the crooks in Washington until they’ve proven that they can manage it appropriately.
That was the idea behind the tax cuts, to starve the beast. Republicans then discovered deficit spending and concluded that increasing the national debt was a virtue. Cutting off taxes merely makes the problem worse when Congress and the president are determined to spend beyond their means.