Word: evens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Keating sought to keep his savings and loan operating even though the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) in San Francisco had found enough bad loans and shaky business practices to shut it down. After Keating purchased Lincoln in 1984, he switched from investing in safe, single-family mortgages to go-go deals in raw land, junk bonds and huge development projects like the $900-a-night Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz...
...even talk about fairness. Almost no one disputes that most of the benefit of the proposed tax break for capital gains -- profits from the sale of investment assets such as stocks and real estate -- would go to people with incomes of more than $200,000 a year, or that the average person in that pleasant category would save $25,000 a year in taxes. The dispute is whether this break (which has passed the House and is currently stalled in the Senate) would be so good for the economy that we would all prosper from it, making resistance on fairness...
...ideal free-market tax system would be no taxes at all. Taxes discourage productive activity: working, saving, investing. Even President Bush, though, seems to recognize that we can't borrow the entire federal budget. So taxes are necessary. In real life, the ideal free-market tax system is one where taxes affect people's economic decisions as little as possible. That is, a tax system that leaves the world looking as much as possible like one with no taxes...
...less efficient. A tax break for capital gains would reduce this so-called lock-in effect. (Although, please note, this is exactly the opposite of one argument usually heard for a capital-gains break -- that we need to encourage long-term investment.) What would reduce the lock-in effect even more, however -- without adding to the favorable treatment capital gains already enjoy -- would be to tax capital gains at death. People would then know that their gains could not escape tax forever...
This is not the picture of the crack epidemic portrayed by the nightly news. On TV, crack addicts are almost invariably blacks and Hispanics from the ghetto. In real life, the problem is much broader: the number of white middle- and upper-class crack users may equal -- or even exceed -- the total from poor minority communities. No government studies break down crack use by economic status, but William Hopkins, a leading narcotics expert working for the state of New York, estimates that 70% of New York City's drug users are affluent. Across the U.S., drug counselors report rising numbers...