patrick.net

Honest Abe says

why not just go to the end result and be done with it?

We are on the road to the end result already, and it looks far more like the Monopoly endgame than your USSR fantasies.

Even with a flat tax..

Why should I be taxed x2 if I work x2 than somebody else and I obtain the same services from the government...

Isn't this an inefficient/unfair government? What stops me to migrate to the first country that promises me x1 tax only?

For good or for bad, in the era of globalization, governments loose their monopoly power. It's just a question of time till they start treating us as a corporation would do.. competing to obtain our labor and to offer their services.

Yes, the game is pretty much over. A few people own everything, and continuously redistribute the wealth of everyone else upward to themselves without doing any work.

Honest Abe absolutely loves wealth redistribution, as long as it is redistribution from people who actually work and produce upward to the 0.1% who do not work or produce.

Abe, you're the best friend the ruling class ever had. And the best entertainment! They laugh themselves silly as you demand that we all serve them forever because they are "successful". Of course they'd never eat with you or let you marry one of them though. You're just a useful idiot.

dunnross says

Why do we have to pay cap gain taxes at all?

The real question is why do we tax productivity, not rent. We shouldn't have an income at all except as it was originally intended, a tax on the opulently rich to pay for social services that eliminate systematic and inherited poverty. It should never have been used for general purpose funding or the military.

But we could eliminate the capital gains tax on proper investments by using the formula I've proposed many times:
max(0.0, 1.00 - 0.01 * m) where m is the number of months you hold a property. Simple, easy to calculate formula. Doesn't allow for cost-averaging, but everyone would want to use FIFO anyway to minimize their tax burden.

I'm still here. Lord the gullible are alive and well.

clambo says

Of course they are death taxes, they are paid upon someone's death.
There is no aristocracy here, you must not have lived outside the USA. Go and report back to us.
The proof of my point is the millions of Europeans and others who have come here to improve their lives.

The proper term is inheritance tax. "Death tax" was a marketing term selected after expensive marketing studies and promoted by the Republican party to please their major donors.

Obviously there is an aristocracy in America. The upper classes inherit their parents' vast wealth without working, duh. Just look at the wealth distribution. You are forced to labor for them simply because they own all the best land and capital assets. So they get richer AND pay lower taxes than productive people, widening the gap more and more each generation, killing all incentive to do productive work.

I've lived outside the USA several times. A year in Austria, a year in Germany, a summer in England, and a summer in Holland. All of those countries have higher social mobility than we do (and better health care systems too). They do not have a tiny 0.1% taking all the money from productive workers like America does. They no longer emigrate to the USA. Why would they? We have adopted hereditary aristocracy after they abandoned it.

oliverks1 says

People pulling out $1 million a year are usually living the good life and less focused on creating jobs.

I sure would be, wouldn't you?

The proper term is inheritance tax. "Death tax" was a marketing term selected after expensive marketing studies and promoted by the Republican party to please their major donors.

Yep. The term "death tax" is a political term. Just like the term "homophobia." Just by using these words, we do the bidding of those who created them.

Also see "death panels."

They no longer emigrate to the USA. Why would they? We have adopted hereditary aristocracy after they abandoned it.

God Bless America. The best country in the world!

Patrick, redistribution is where money is taken, under the threat of force, and given to those deemed "worthy".

It is not "redistribution" when an employer willingly OFFER's a position to an prospective employee who willingly ACCEPT's the offer of employment. (Then the boss pays as little as possible in order to keep the employee, while the employee does as little work as possible in order to prevent termination).

Please point out the "redistribution" in this very common scenario.

The main problem is that the rich are forcing middle classes to pay their taxes for them

In so far as I can tell it's the low to middle income people who aren't paying any income taxes.

Approximately 50% pay NO federal income tax at all. Whats wrong with them paying their "fair share"?

There has never been a time in modern history "my" system worked, BECAUSE there has never been a time in modern history that "my"system was allowed to work without laws, rules, codes, regulations which sabotaged the results.

Liberal, democratic, socialistic, communistic thinking creates laws which gum up the works and yield bad results. Their solution? MORE bad laws, rules and regulations.

Radical liberalism, and democratic policies have created a relentless attack on all of the principals which individual liberty, sound business practices and rational social order rest...for the "common good", of course.

Honest Abe says

There has never been a time in modern history "my" system worked, BECAUSE there has never been a time in modern history that "my"system was allowed to work without laws, rules, codes, regulations which sabotaged the results.

And yet you are sure it will work. Sounds like an ideolog to me. I think the closest thing to what you want would be Somalia or central Congo.

The use of that term immediate identifies you as a brainwashed supporter of hereditary aristocracy in America.

Why shouldn't I be able to retire on my parents' money? Why shouldn't I be able to, upon my death, pass the money I have accrued to my children so that they can live better instead of being wage slaves in the rat race?

If you have a real gain and didn't do anything productive to get it, that seems a worthy object of taxation.

But I agree that any gain below inflation should not be taxed, because it's not a real gain.

The best tax is on non-productive rent-seeking, specifically land ownership.

The worst tax is on productive work. So the worst tax is the tax on wages you actually earned.

1. For a regular investor (not an insider) investing is a lot of work, and many of his investments are at risk of loss (and do lose value). E.g. in my case I was "underemployed" in 2001 and had a luxury to spend days and weeks analyzing the stock market bubble and learning how to invest. As a result I still carry some nicely appreciated positions (mostly, gold mining stocks and mutual funds).

2. If you want to be 'fair', you need to propose equal treatment of gains and losses. The way it is now, they happily tax your gains, but limit your loss deduction to $3K/yr. I know a few people that still were not able to deduct they market bubble losses from 2000-2001.

anon12366 says

Why shouldn't I be able to retire on my parents' money? Why shouldn't I be able to, upon my death, pass the money I have accrued to my children so that they can live better instead of being wage slaves in the rat race?

Because the rest of us don't want your kids controlling our labor. That's an aristocracy/kleptocracy, not a democracy.

anon12366 says

The use of that term immediate identifies you as a brainwashed supporter of hereditary aristocracy in America.

Why shouldn't I be able to retire on my parents' money? Why shouldn't I be able to, upon my death, pass the money I have accrued to my children so that they can live better instead of being wage slaves in the rat race?

"Being wage slaves" is what your parents used to call "working for a living". The last thing the world needs is more trust fund slackers.

bdrasin says

"Being wage slaves" is what your parents used to call "working for a living". The last thing the world needs is more trust fund slackers.

Alameda CA? Everybody's a wage slave... look at real estate prices ESPECIALLY the people who work for a living. I don't want to pay health care,retirement, or second home mortgages for greedy Cali baby boomer "middle class" retirees with a million dollars in home equity in the middle of a reinflating housing bubble.

Personally, in my opinion being able to live off dividend income whether they be off of individual equities, or bond mutual funds is the true american dream instead of being the homeowner. However, bond mutual funds have always been taxed as ordinary income (municipal bond funds being the exception) so it's not as though one is living high on the hog off of this cash flow via tax advantages. Well, you can always keep them in the roth ira and not pay tax, but then you can't touch the "earnings" unless you r 59.5 and had the account open for 5 years. In which case, you can't really quit the "rat race." As far as pure capital gains oriented funds go, they tend to be much more volatile and while they do enjoy favorable tax structure, they have a much bigger speculative feel of "paper wins" and "paper losses" till cashed out.

anon12366 says

bdrasin says

"Being wage slaves" is what your parents used to call "working for a living". The last thing the world needs is more trust fund slackers.

Alameda CA? Everybody's a wage slave... look at real estate prices ESPECIALLY the people who work for a living. I don't want to pay health care,retirement, or second home mortgages for greedy Cali baby boomer "middle class" retirees with a million dollars in home equity in the middle of a reinflating housing bubble.

Don't look at me, I rent.

anon12366 says

I don't want to pay health care,retirement, or second home mortgages for greedy Cali baby boomer "middle class" retirees with a million dollars in home equity in the middle of a reinflating housing bubble.

You can always move to the Rust Belt. Here in Corning-Elmira you can buy a modest house for $100k in a safe neighborhood. For $200k you can have a large and very nice house.

Just be sure you have a good job lined up before you move here, of course.
;-)

wthrfrk80 says

anon12366 says

I don't want to pay health care,retirement, or second home mortgages for greedy Cali baby boomer "middle class" retirees with a million dollars in home equity in the middle of a reinflating housing bubble.

You can always move to the Rust Belt. Here in Corning-Elmira you can buy a modest house for $100k in a safe neighborhood. For $200k you can have a large and very nice house.

Just be sure you have a good job lined up before you move here, of course.

;-)

You know who should be living in cheap housing in the middle of nowhere? Retirees, baby boomer hippies... not young working adults with families.

Do you know who should be "house poor"? Unemployed, government assistance-dependent retirees, not mortgage-indebted young working adults with families and children.

anon12366 says

You know who should be living in cheap housing in the middle of nowhere? Retirees, baby boomer hippies... not young working adults with families.

Agree. But this is America!

Yeah, Corning-Elmira is a bit isolated. Other Rust Belt cities have more to do.

Then there are places like Dallas/Fort-Worth, Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago that have a "moderate" cost of living and still have plenty of urban amenities.