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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: brushwud who wrote (6052)	3/10/2004 12:57:01 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

You had one house and ten years later you still have...one house. Why should that purely illusory gain be taxed at all? Same story if it was GE or some other stock. Well, first of all we have tax exemptions for housing sales of 500K. I am not suggesting that should be repealed. But as far as not taxing capital gains equally with labor, I don't think we as a society can afford that anymore considering that we seem to be in a sort of permanent "easy money" environment with jobs hard to get do you? The problem we have today is that your average college hire is having to compete with the third world for pay scale, we know the statistics say the wage gap is widening... and assets are inflating. It is A LOT easier to make $200K in capital appreciation than in salary. Why should salary be taxed more? If you think about it, the worker actually produces something, in theory he should probably be taxed LESS than idle capital. Its a tough problem and I don't know what the solution is... the first thing that really has to go is fica though. That is impeding hiring. As far as a VAT, I consider those to be regressive... but even worse, I know when I saw the VAT on one of the AMD computers I wanted (in the UK) I was shocked, it was 20% of the price of the item or something... that is really going to impede sales. I'm not sure a VAT is the answer. I'd probably prefer a flat tax of say 5% on all wages and capital gains with a housing exclusion. Not sure if that would suffice though. And corp taxes are too low, Buffett is exactly right. Krugman pointed that out a few months ago.