The Blue Board

BLF, that was my guess as to your take on that. I understand the resistance to the first part and by itself, I might be inclined to agree as a stand alone policy. I am an advocate of conversion to consumption only taxes. Something along the lines of the "fair tax" with the pre-bate for taxes paid up to the poverty level eliminates the regressive tax issue with respect to necessity items (all taxes paid are in essence a choice by the consumer). That's another thread though, as is the rest of this really (sorry OP). I am a bit pleasently surprised by your "Yes" without limitations on the second part. I want all of the loopholes and write-offs gone. This includes those that help the poor/middle class mostly: mortgage, child, ... as well as those that mostly help the rich: charitable donations, writing off personal items as business costs, pool all income together, I don't care where you get it (ie captil gains, but you use the net capital gains)... It also includes all tax credits: education, earned income, green energy...

For people like me (very middle class), when I pay capital gains taxes on my investments (which were largely made with post-tax traditional salaried income), it is double taxation. For the uber wealthy who make their money almost solely off of investments, then it really isn't double taxation. The problem becomes the differentiation, when does it stop being double taxed??? When you make > 25, 50% of your income off investments??? I don't know we can eliminate this by treating all income as just that, income (or better yet stop taxing income). Now I would say that a you should use your net capital gains as your "income".

On the "communistic" comment, I would agree and am part of the "people" you refer to. If the "consumption tax rate" is 10% (arbitrary for easy numbers), the guy who purchases a Rolls will pay $40K in taxes (new ones avg about 400K), but the guy who purchases a new Camry will only pay about $3K. Why is there a need to punish the guy buying the Rolls? By choosing to buy the more expensive car they are in effect choosing to pay $37K more in taxes or more than 1200% more in absolute taxes. At what point does it stop being "reasonable" with respect to buying a car, watch, home... and become excessive? That is for each man to decide and thus why I am fundamentally against differntiation amongst items with respect to a consumption/sales tax.

Also, I'm 100% against double taxation, I just want people to know the differences. Your example of gains on middle class investments should be adjusted but look at this scenario, a mid to upper management/board of director/CEO/COO/you get the idea it's a lot of people working at a good sized corportation or firm gets paid 1 million a year. They work hard, fair market value, liberals can go eat a dick. Over 10yrs at that position they make 10m and with taxes they walk with roughly 6m...again liberals can sit on it and rotate. My issue comes in when they start taking 300k in "income" and 700k in stock shares...pay 40% on the "income" and sit on the shares for a year just to pay 15%. Over those 10yrs that's roughly 7.75m instead of 6m and that person hasn't done anything extra to deserve that money. It's also a win/win for employer and employee since the market is essentially paying those wages instead of the company. Those are the things I'm worried about.

Why do you want to tax the "Rich Spenders" more than the average joe or the "rich & frugal"??? Your logic seems odd to me. The person who is spending wildly is not likely using that much more gov't services, so why put a punative tax on him??? The spender is more than paying for his use of gov't services. He can't live in more than one home at a time or drive more than one care at a time, but ... By buying that other car, the 2nd home... he is employing more people (those that built the home, sold the home, made/service the car... The speding guy is doing more for the local economies and is paying a greater % of his income in taxes. You want to put an arbitrary "punishment/luxury" tax on him. Almost all will agree that the more you tax something, the less you get of it. Why would you want to discourage this spending fool?