It doesn’t matter how high the capital gains tax is, if there are no capital gains.
I’m just sayin’….
Can’t Bring Yourself to Type the Word “Ass”?
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!
Come on Puddy, Scott, MTR, Troll:
Refute that!!
Does this mean the producers are not producing?
Just how is this the Democrats fault?
Who has been in charge of the lax oversight and deregulation?
What would Sarah do?
What would McSame do?….um never mind. Maybe he could send Sarah an email…..crap, he can’t do that…..What is the difference between Sarah and Cheney? Lipstick!!
It is the economy, STUPID!!
Today, cooked McCain’s moose, er, I mean goose.
He said (with a straight face no less)’the fundamentals of the economy are strong.’
I can’t stop laughing.
The fundamentals are gone. We are left with a bunch of rogue corporations dictating policy to a president who does not understand the first principle of the economy.
Carly Fiorina used to be a MILF. But she was fired from her last job. How is she McCain’s economic advisor? McCain seems to have a thing for these MILF’s. Cindy should put her foot down. If she doesn’t, soon Ann Coultergeist will be his press secretary.
Lemme see…..
Lehman folds, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go into receivership and this is GOOD for the economy?
Venerable Merrill Lynch (Pierce, Fenner and Bean, for you old guys) gets bought at a discount by the Evil Empire (who is so over exposed now it makes Deja Vu seem like a ladies church social) and this is heralded as a wonderful thing. How is this wonderful? It is only delaying the inevitable.
When the crash hits, before the election, someone stop my laughing long enough to get to the polls and vote for four more years of this entertainment. (NOTE TO WINGNUTS: This is sarcasm.)
How about making capital losses deductible against ordinary income? Or raising the limit on the deductibility of capital losses from the paltry $3000 that it is now?
That Palin bounce in the polls is about to become a McCain thud.
Democrats would like to take this opportunity to thank the Republican party for all they have done to help elect President Barack Obama.
6:
So you screw up and you want to pay less taxes because you were stupid? You gambled. You lost.
Just like a Republican to want the government to bail him out.
Please, get a grip.
What?! The leftist media taking the Republican candidate’s words out of context. I’m shocked, shocked I say…
If you managed to listen to the _whole_ statement from McCain, there were serious caveats at the beginning, which CNN et al, cut out. His take was that reform needs to happen and it should start in Congress.
I’m in favor of prosecuting the democratic hacks and leftovers from the Clinton administration that took cushy jobs at Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, then lied about the corporate profits. Jim Johnson and Jamie Gorelick are two names that pop to mind. Those two should be in prison stripes.
Oh wait, that might cause Obama a few problems since Johnson is a campaign advisor and chaired the team that picked Biden. On the other hand, he could blame Johnson for Biden and toss him under the bus with Ayers, Dorhn, Rezko, Wright, Pfleuger, and all the rest.
9
I watched him this morning. He said it. How can anyone think that? He should check with Sarah before he speaks.
Goldy-
To your original thesis – Who would invest money knowing that any gains are going to be taxed at a high rate when other options exist.
Any investor looks at the tax consequences BEFORE investing. Taxes are a reduction on return. Given 2 options with similar risks and returns, the options with the larger return AFTER taxes are paid, will be the likely course.
High tax RATES are a disincentive to investment. Since capital can flee borders much easier than people, it will. Money goes where it’s treated well.
# 6: Only if you can go back at least six years and count capital gains as ordinary income.
Oh, and don’t forget to file a Schedule SE with that tax return – a person who makes his money fliping stocks should be considered self employed, as much as the owner of an independent hamburger stand who flips burgers for a living. The tax rate is 15% on profits from the business, with no personal deductions or exemptions. Why should a person who sits at a desk playing with his computer and flipping stocks get a tax break over a guy who’s literally earning a living by the sweat of his brow?
Yep, high tax rates CAN be an dis-encintive to investment. And high tax rates can be a dis-encintive to working, too. Right now labor is dis-proportionately taxed with respect to investment.
But the old argument that you have to keep lowering tax rates in order to induce the wealthy to invest their earnings is flawed. Wealthy people may turn around and re-invest their money, or they may just waste it. There is no reason in the world to give them a blanket tax break when the taxes upon the middle-class wage-earner are as high as they are. If we want to encourage investment, there are other ways to craft a tighter deduction which would accomplish that purpose.
But if you are thinking of sending your money offshore to be invested, you better think about how you are going to get it back. If you remain a U.S. citizen or legal resident, you are still liable for those taxes. If you want to surrender your U.S. citizenship and live abroad, go right ahead and do so – don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
@2 – Sarah is going to Pray to God that their is no depression. She know which cloud he hangs out on.
I’m in favor of prosecuting the democratic hacks and leftovers from the Clinton administration that took cushy jobs at Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, then lied about the corporate profits.
Who the hell let them do it? Anyone hear of the SEC? Who was running that for the last eight years?
Heh. You guys are so fucked!
freddie mac and fanny mae are both democratic programs enough said.sen dodd should be in jail.and charlie rangel doesnt know that rental income is reportable on you taxes hahahaha
Tommy Tompson spews:
@2 – Sarah is going to Pray to God that their is no depression.
Why would she do that, she already anwered that prayer. Obama has little or no chance of becoming president since she entered the race. But you still have the right to dream. Sleep tight. hehehehe
3
Now this is funny
Biden:
Uh, Uh, Chuck Graham, state senator is here. Stand up, Chuck. Let ’em see you. Oh. God love you. What am I talking about? I tell you what, you’re making everybody else stand up, though, pal.
hahahahaaha
Why do democrats hate and want to kill handicap people?
freddie mac and fanny mae are both democratic programs enough said.sen dodd should be in jail.and charlie rangel doesnt know that rental income is reportable on you taxes
————
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Invest in Lawmakers
See: http://www.opensecrets.org/new.....eddie.html
Wall Street Shake-up Connects to Washington Through Contributions, Personal Investments
See: http://www.opensecrets.org/new.....cts-t.html
Also see my previous post (#17) here:
http://www.horsesass.org/?p=6946#comments
regarding the contributions to McCain and Obama from the financial services industry.
The best thing about Sarah is she showed that there are more conservative feminists than there are liberal ones.
Well…in the same words: It doesn’ matter how high your tax increase is if you don’t pay any taxes
or
It doesn’t matter how much crap you right if no one reads it.
Come on, you should know better than just goating the poor guys here who follow you on the envy train.
Unless of course, you think cap gains are only short term gap gains. If you bought some stocks in 1998 and the moved up 100 % (that means they doubled)…and they dropped 20 % …you still made a gain…you know this, I know this.
Same with the housing market. It’s a longer term investment, not a short flip “let’s buy that condo in LasVegas and sell it for a profit in 5 weeks”.
But I can tell you, if we do run into the next great depression as so many here predict (aka mindlessly repeat), you bill be in a much greater level of pain than many others.
There are two many people involved worldwide to let this completely get out of wack. Trust me. Soon cooler heads will prevail.
Note to Goldy, Capital Gains don’t just happen for people who make $250,000 or more per year.
Is Obama maybe telling a little fib type lie when he says he is for doubling the Capital Gains tax, but he will not raise taxes on those who make less than $250,000 per year.
That is a magic trick I gotta see.
So if anyone at any income base decides to sell their savings bonds, rental home, muni bonds, stock, you name it, will they get to keep all that income unless they make over $250,000 like Obama says?
Just askin!
ABC reports, quotes Obama as having said on Good Morning America today, “If we’re going to ask questions about, you know, who has been promulgating negative ads that are completely unrelated to the issues at hand, I think I win that contest pretty handily.”
Whoa!!! Finally ABC and Obama telling the truth in the same story, but only for a couple sentences.
Capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as ordinary income.
What’s so difficult about that? Maybe you put in some sweat to appreciate the asset, maybe you didn’t. You realize the gain and some of it goes to service the debt for Bush’s stupid occupation of Iraq.
If you don’t want higher taxes don’t support wars supported by Faux News.
Didn’t Obama use his “business acumen” at some company when he gradiated from Columbia: “Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant.”
Hmmm… seems he may have exaggerated it? You see for yourself. yelling loser boy is exempt as he can’t read anything which could be construed not from Kos, his kool-aid company.
http://sweetness-light.com/arc.....eet-career
How does Puddy find this stuff? I am the king of “Puddy Punditry”.
gs@22, I asked the same question two weeks ago and the HA “swarm” was nasty.
I am just repeating Obama’s exact words:
“If you’re a family making less than $250,000 my plan will not raise your taxes one penny. Not your Income tax, not your payroll tax, not your CAPITOL GAINS tax, not ANY of your taxes.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LOzxNcU6Kc
Now how does a capital gains tax increase not cost those families who make under $250,000 one penny as he is saying?
Just askin?
Obama is a fucking liar when he says he won’t raise my taxes. He wants to remove the lid from Sosh Security payments.
I sure as shit don’t want to have to pay Sosh Security the whole fucking year. That will cost me and my employer a helluva lot of money.
It’s a fucking tax increase.
Why do you guys have to fucking LIE all the time?
McCain is right.
CONGRESS makes the laws.
The Democratic-controlled Congress has failed miserably the last 2 years.
Please KLOWNS, show me a law the Democratic Congress passed the past 2 years that would have benefitted the economy or prevented the Lehman Bros meltdown??
Treating long term capital gains the same way as ordinary income is by definition a tax increase…. there is no two ways about it. Any two bit CPA can tell you that. Geeesh.
Lehman Bros. gave 3 times more to O-blah-blah than McCain.
The numbers speak for themselves.
Read & weep KLOWNS.
Well if Roger Rabbit was in charge, he’d just round up all the evil capitalists and shoot em like the good mass murderin’ tyrant he is – bless his elderly heart.
SOME OF YOU LEFTIST SHIT HEADS TELL ME HOW THE GREAT ONE IS GOING TO GIVE PEOPLE 95% A TAX REFUND IMPOSSIBLE AS 40% DO NOT PAY TAXES IT IS SIMPLEY RE DITRUBTION.
WHAT DOES OBAMA CALL IT WHEN HE DOES AWAY WITH THE BUSH TAX CUT.OH NO NOT A TAX INCREASE.THIS GUY SIMPLY PUT IS AN IDIOT.DO THEY MAKE PORTABLE TELEPROMTERS.JUST ASKIN.MAYBE HE CAN GET A TWO WAY DICK TRACY WATCH FOR THE DEBATES.
I wonder if the right includes anyone who ever took ec 101. “Capital” and money are not exactly the same thing. Money you might use to buy 9 homes, super fancy shoes, and the latest 30″ plasma screen .. THAT money may well felle to avoid taxes. BUT investment money, that is capital, will go where it can achieve the best return on investment.
On eof the odd things about 2008 is that this rule is being violated by a new player .. the sovereign investment fund. The Chinese people do not own much US debt, but their communist government does! Their incentives to invest are driven by a very different set of forces than anything we have seen before in history.
Investment in the US, no matter how well they do are only important to China if the money can improve the power of the party .. e.g. but buying arms, oil, or increased productivity at home.
@6 “How about making capital losses deductible against ordinary income? Or raising the limit on the deductibility of capital losses from the paltry $3000 that it is now?”
I have a better idea. Let’s make capital losses deductible against inheritances. I call this the easy-come easy-go principle.
@9 “What?! The leftist media taking the Republican candidate’s words out of context. I’m shocked, shocked I say…”
Baloney. If you want to know what a shock is, go downstairs to the laundry room, and grab a water pipe going into the ground in one hand and stick a screwdriver into the 220-volt dryer outlet with the other hand.
@32 “Well if Roger Rabbit was in charge, he’d just round up all the evil capitalists and shoot em like the good mass murderin’ tyrant he is – bless his elderly heart.”
Why not? They did it to us every time we withheld our labor to bargain for better wages and working conditions. They even used government troops to do the shooting. The cheap-labor capitalist fucks made the taxpayers pay for the bullets.
@34 “WHAT DOES OBAMA CALL IT WHEN HE DOES AWAY WITH THE BUSH TAX CUT.”
Poor uninformed wingnut! Obama doesn’t have to do away with the Bush tax cuts, because the Republicans have already done away with them. The tax cuts passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president will expire by themselves unless re-enacted by the Democratic Congress and signed by President Obama, which he intends to do for everyone making less than $250,000 a year.
@28 We’ve asked President Obama to make a special exception for you because you’re such an asshole, Mark. Now shut up and pay your debt to Goldy or quit freeloading on his blog, you useless vermin.
@30 “Treating long term capital gains the same way as ordinary income is by definition a tax increase…. there is no two ways about it. Any two bit CPA can tell you that. Geeesh.”
Not on wage earners, it isn’t.
@30 Since the owners of capital got all the tax cuts, why shouldn’t they also get all the tax increases? Why should the rest of us put up with deficit inflation so coupon-clippers can get a free ride?
More to the point, why should stock market winnings be taxed at a lower rate than wages?
Hey Cynical how are your bank stocks doing? Har har har har
Yes, the little man economy may be interesting but Obama doesn’t hang with the working man.
From Drudge:
OBAMA BOOM ECONOMY: RECORD BANK IN BEV HILLS, $28,500 A PLATE!
Tue Sep 16 2008 06:25:55 ET
The nation’s financials may be in a spiral, but cash is flowing into the Obama campaign faster than Marvin Hamlisch can play “Niagara”!
Yesterday, Obama declared how we are in “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
Today he will host a dinner in Beverly Hills — costing attendees $28,500 dollars each!
Hundreds of high rollers, including some of the biggest executives in film, television and music, will munch gourmet chow and hang out with the candidate.
Streisand will then sing at the five-star Beverly Wilshire, no doubt reviving the Depression-era standard “Happy Days Are Here Again” with new urgency.
Obama is set to break a single-day fundraising record of $9 million.
Tuesday’s events in Tinseltown come after Obama racked up a record-breaking $66 million dollars in fundraising last month, beating his previous high mark of $55 million last winter.
“The fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are still very, very difficult times,” rival McCain said, sunny-side up.
“Sen. McCain, what economy are you talking about?” smiled Obama.
Obam is correct. He doesn’t understand the working man issues.
rhp6033 said:
“…Right now labor is dis-proportionately taxed with respect to investment.”
Well then, why not enact a flat-rate income tax? What does all the complexity do other than serve as a jobs program for accountants, lawyers and tax prep people?
I’m just sayin’…
I was reminded last night that Lehman Bros. survived the Civil War, the financial panics of the late 1800’s, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, and 1987’s “Black Monday”. But it couldn’t survive the Bush Administration.
I pointed out in previous posts that in Japan they are calling the financial meltdown “The American Disease”, and they are blaming their current economic problems on the U.S. situation. Large Japanese banks that bought mortgage-backed U.S. securities are having a tough time. They bought those securities thinking the U.S. government regulated financial dealings involving real estate (based upon experience prior to the Bush administration), so these were supposed to be safe, conservative, investment. So now they are really ticked off at the U.S. now, thinking that the U.S. has swindled the Japanese bankers out of good money by selling them worthless pieces of paper.
If you know anything about Japan, trust in business relationships is everything. If you do anything to betray that trust, then they will never do business with you again.
I was expecting the Nikei(sp?) Index to drop overnight in reaction to the U.S. markets. But what I didn’t expect was the e-mail I just saw from a colleague on a business trip to Japan:
Hopefully, that’s a temporary misunderstanding which will be corrected soon. But it’s a sobering experience to realize that Americans are becoming thought of as being from a third-world country with worthless currency.
It’s like being a legitimate businessman from Nigeria who can’t get anybody to reply to his e-mails or accept his orders for goods.
Puddy @ 44: Obama’s going to need all the money he can to counter McCain’s lies. It doesn’t bother me a bit that he’s taking that money from people who’ve got a lot of it to spare.
It’s better than the McCain tax plan, which works the other way around.
@35
You obviously didn’t recognize the phrase I used.
Money and capital can be used interchangeably for the most part. The difference is intent, not material.
The money in my pocket is not part of my investment capital because I haven’t transferred it to my broker yet.
rhp6033@48: You mean the truths like we just found out about the sex-ed for kindergartners? You mean all the Obama supporters/advisors who are from Wall Street and were cheering the sub-prime mortgage market before?
What are you smoking in Everett?
rhp6033@46:
rhp6033: Again you have 24 hour memory syndrome:
Lehman Brothers $365,922 – Obama
Lehman Brothers $115,800 – McCain
Let me reeducate you rhp6033, since you are blinded with BDS in the Left eye and PDS in the right eye.
patterico.com/2008/09/15/obama -friendly-lehman-bros-to-file- chapter-11-bankruptcy/
That 72% to Donkey since 1989 increased to a higher value in the 21st century.
Delbert @ 49: I think that by definition, money is capital. How it ultimately gets used is a further sub-division of the category.
For example, money can be invested in the stock market, or used to purchase business equipment, or consumed in the course of business, or consumed in the course of personal expenditures. Either way, it could be a good investment or a bad one, it could make money or it could lose money.
Money could be used to buy a couch. If the couch sits in my living room, it is still capital. It can be converted to cash on the used-furniture market, although the return on investment in that sense would be a negative number, and the proceeds invested elsewhere. Or I could buy the couch for the lobby of my office, and it would be a business expense and possibly a reasonable part of my total business investment. It’s still capital.
To use another example, let’s take money used to for the most personal of expenditures: food. Normally we don’t think of this as a capital expenditure, because once the food is consumed the money – and what it was used to purchase – is gone and not recoverable. But if I use the same money to buy food while I pursue a higher degree in my field, then you could say that the money was a capital investment in my future, since my future earning potential is increased by the investment of my time and resources in pursuing the degree. Whether or not it actually turns out to be a good investment might depend upon other factors, such as the field of study, the future of that industry, my grades, my interview skills, etc.
@52 “money” vs “capital”
Semantic arguments end up in the OED or Wiki. The important point is capital is NOT driven away by taxes unless the effects of the taxes is to decrease the ability of the capital to grow. Raingin ir changng the tax structure in ways that increases productivity will stimulate capital flow into a country.
As always misery to the American people is a laxative for Donkey campaigns.
Candy Crowley on Anderson Cooper’s 360: “Just as foreclosures were showing up on B-17, or in the real estate section, along comes this horrific headline out of Wall Street…I mean, this is what they wanted.”
Yes, Donkey love misery!
So much Obama and his invade Pakistan stance…
http://ap.google.com/article/A.....AD937RO2G0
43. Roger Rabbit spews:
“Hey Cynical how are your bank stocks doing? Har har har har”
Wells Fargo is doing excellent! Was up over $3/share today. Thanks for asking!
David Patterson, Governor (D-NY) is begging for a bailout of Lehman Bros. and AIG.
Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is a tax cheat
O-blah-blah (D-Ill) has accepted over 3 times more contributions from Lehman Bros than McCain.
Lehman hates McCain because he is a reformer and won’t bail them out.
Puddybud spews:
Did you ever consider that perhaps the people who work there are voting with small personal contributions in hopes of keeping their jobs?
Want to bet on what party the exec’s are a part of?
idiot–
You certainly are grasping at straws!.
You are in denial that O-blah-blah is in the pocket of Lehman Bros and big business. You have been duped.
Vote for Nader.
Lehman gave him ZERO.