lizzie, of COURSE the government taxes labor and not passive income. in fact, 100% of what the government taxes is labor.
some basic economics here, once we've gone to a fiat currency instead of the gold standard and money has no intrinsic value whatsoever except as a promise of labor of a country's citizens:
the government can print as much money as it wants with the press of a key at the treasury -they do own the printing presses you know- but that won't get the things done that the government needs done. it will just make the dollar collapse.
governments needs LABOR. the reason labor is taxed is because taxes (which must be paid in dollars if you live here) are simply a demand by the government to give them a certain amount of labor per year.
the government doesnt want your dollars, they want your LABOR.
if I had 500 trillion dollars sitting in my bank account and was the richest person in america, tell me what good it would do for the government to tax 99% of my wealth away. nothing. they would just get a bunch of paper money that they printed in the first place, and not much new labor would be generated by just myself having to get a job and work for a living instead of having a passive income. if the government took my 500 trillion dollars and just gave it to everyone in america, would everyone suddenly be better off? no- the prices for everything would go up. while the money was in my bank account, it let me live like royalty and have three house servants and a bunch of sports cars, but at least it kept 500 trillion dollars OUT OF CIRCULATION which would depress the value of all existing dollars.
just remember- taxes are nothing but demands for labor. it is impossible to tax passive income, really, because money itself can't be taxed. only people can be. money can't just "earn interest" sitting there in a bank- that's an illusion. interest is just a fancy term for "we promise to inflate the money supply by this much in the future"
no wealth is ever generated without LABOR, at least not on a national scale.
-------------------------
yeah- well unfortunately, while it sounds wonderful to economists to offshore everything away to build goods and services cheaper, it is destroying the USA from within, because we have skewed the tax code for so long to favor passive income, wageearners are the only people paying for all this pork. Wages just didn't go down 10,20% for the people I work with- they went down 70%. So, the govt better come up with some solutions.... so far nothing... and they are all gone in November- good riddance. |
