Word: taxing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first problem is that there would not be that much tax revenue. Although newly-bought apartments would be taxed at market value, the home ownership tax exemption would discount the taxable value by about...
...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...
...Such a tax system has two features. First, rates as low as possible. At this late date in the supply-side revolution, you don't need any more sermons about the evil effects of high tax rates. But there is a second, equally important feature. Tax rates should be the same on alternative forms of economic activity. If plumbers are taxed more than electricians, there will be fewer plumbers and more electricians than the free market would dictate. If a tax break goes to timber but not to steel, investment flows out of the steel industry and into the timber...
Second, billions of dollars (not to mention vast reservoirs of human ingenuity) can be wasted turning disfavored forms of income into favored forms. The essential function of the tax-shelter industry was converting ordinary income into capital gains, before the gains break was eliminated in the 1986 tax reform...