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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (370878)	2/14/2008 6:12:43 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572965

First you want Americans to save more, now you want to tax the savers at a higher rate.

To: Road Walker who wrote (370878)	2/14/2008 7:57:00 PM
From: brushwud	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572965

Essentially wealth (passive dividends) gets taxed at a lower rate than work (wages). Dividends are taxed twice: once when the corporation pays income tax on its profit and again when some of the remainder is paid as dividends and shareholders pay income tax on the dividends. Interest (on debt) is deductible to corporations, but not dividends (on equity). As a consequence, corporations are biased in favor of using debt finance instead of equity and have more highly leveraged balance sheets than they otherwise would. And the disincentive to pay dividends causes corporations to hoard cash more than they otherwise would or use it to buy other companies and conglomerate more than they otherwise would. What Bush should've done was make dividends deductible to corporations as an expense and have individuals pay full income tax at their various rates. But it wasn't politically acceptable to give corporations a tax break, so they reduced the individual tax rate on dividends instead.

To: Road Walker who wrote (370878)	2/15/2008 12:43:55 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572965

Buffet (and others) get a lower tax rate because of all dividend tax rates. Munis are a small part of it. Essentially wealth (passive dividends) gets taxed at a lower rate than work (wages). Why is that? Dividends shouldn't be taxed at all. Corporations pay taxes already on their profits, and shareholders are owners of corporations. You shouldn't tax the owners of the corporation twice for simply distributing the already taxed profit to its rightful owner.