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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lnkennedy who wrote (2553)	7/22/1998 3:11:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Respond to of 29970

The purpose of taxation of individuals is to enable a group of individuals to do what the group wouldn't otherwise be able to do: to provide benefits to the group at large which may not benefit directly any individual, but from which all individuals receive benefits indirectly. Taxation began in pre-history when for mutual protection men banded together. Fighting is a specialty service, so it needs a full time service department whose expense is borne by the beneficiaries of the protection provided. Throughout history this has been the justification for taxes. In modern times especially the 20th century the justification has been expanded to such an extent that it discourages the generation of wealth. The universal attitude towards wealth and profit is "your wealth and profit is undeserved and evil whereas mine is worthy and good. This hypocrisy has made a mess out of 20th century economics. It's favorite form of expression is fairness. "We're going to take away your evil profits and give them to the under-privileged, but don't you touch mine, I'll have you killed", is the effective attitude. Also called redistribution this "fairness" is actualized through the levy of taxes. A favorite target of redistribution taxation is capital. The purpose is to make sure the wealthy "pay their fair share". Who pays is the poor, in less capacity or incentive for the producers, the wealthy, to generate product. 75% of Harvard's Econ faculty believes this is a false claim. They have begun with the unwarranted assumption that it is the state's job to practice what Rivlin, and many others previously, calls "Robin Hood Theory of Economics". Rivlin recently made the dubious quip about her creation, "Reverse Robin Hood", which is presumably a state of affairs where government passes laws trying to generate fairness but inadvertently generates laws that arbitrarily reward the rich. Rivlin and Harvard believe this is bad even though it has the tangible effect of raising all boats. They have this prejudice because they have inherited the great American tradition of the war on wealth. It is presumed noble to take away from the rich to give to the poor. Any slob knows that. What even the gods don't know is that prosperity is leveraged by the elimination of taxes on capital, but it is funny that the representatives of the gods go to Japan to demand they reduce their onerous capital gains taxation while the head god, the President, wants to postpone any such action here. Guess that's consistent because he was one of the authors of re-taxation of capital whose effect is yet to be seen. Actually the effect is seen over ten years time because it takes that long before marginal changes in the efficiency of capital, as represented in unit labor productivity, to be seen. The stock market advance of the '90s is caused almost totally by the Reagan tax cuts and NOTHING else. All others factors have neutralizing counter factors. That means what the FED did or what the corporations did, or anything else is net zero. We will be paying by Bush and Clinton re-taxation in coming years. The result will be zero unit labor productivity growth. People are legislating 3 - 5% compensation increases, so that will be the inflation rate. Harvard disagrees because they know of a secret plan to make something out of nothing. I hope rising inflation and interest rates don't hurt the 300 P/E on ATHM. I'm sure it won't. It's a special case?