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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (13060)	8/24/2003 9:21:19 PM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 306849

Keynes did so much for us in the 70s....-ng- I knew what he meant by rentier class. I was taking a round about way to showing him that tax laws designed to go after the "idle rich" almost always wind up hurting the people that the law is designed to benefit. There's almost no way to make a law that raises the tax level on passive income without screwing the middle class primarily because passive income is how someone in the middle class builds wealth and escapes from being a simple wage slave. Building wealth in the middle class is also highly dependent on someone else being willing to lend them capital. Got mortgages? Extend the SS tax of 15.3% to investment income and what happens? I'm still going to want the same after tax return for the risk and I'll get it or I won't invest. So who is it that pays that tax? Its a concept that few people clamoring for higher taxes on investment return ever get. In an effort to tax people with capital to lend or invest they simply raise the cost of capital and drive down the value of income producing vehicles until the after tax yields are where they were before the tax. The rich guy still makes the same return, pays a higher tax but now everyone who borrows money pays more (including the government which oddly enough owes far more than they'll ever see from a higher tax). Welcome to the 70s redux. Why doesn't it surprise me that "rentier" is a French word?