Ending Double Tax Trouble

Wall Street Journal ^ | dec 26, 2002 | Editorial

[The Raven]

Nothing is a sure thing in politics. Just ask former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill. But it does look like the Bush Administration is going to come up with a significant tax cut soon. And the betting is that it will include a proposal to reduce if not end the double taxation of dividends.

[The Raven]

The old saying is "Whatever you tax you get less of." We can't tax liberals or snow...but here in the good ol' U S of A --- we tax savings, investment and productivity.

[KC_for_Freedom]

The less the government plays the role of the income redistributionist the better. Simple taxes, like a flat tax will allow the free market to operate without trying to modify its actions to gain the most favorable tax position. Should allow the rest of us the same.

Double taxes, as is pointed out above, are simply a form of putting the wealthy in a special higher tax bracket. It is of course unfair, but also devious.

[visitor]

bump for later reading

[thedugal]

Duh! Corporations are evil. Everyone knows that. Tax them all twice.. what a stupid article. </democrat>

[lepton]

Aversion to dividends also allows bad corporate practices to go unnoticed and unpunished by the market. Paying dividends requires real cash, not paper earnings that can be the result of fanciful accounting or even fraud, as we've all seen this year. It's easy to manipulate operating earnings but impossible to fake dividend payments.

Not quite impossible to fake dividend payments (Ponzi schemes are still possible), but otherwise, right on the nose. A dividend market has a stable value, a speculative market is based on bubbles.

[lepton]

Simple taxes, like a flat tax will allow the free market to operate without trying to modify its actions to gain the most favorable tax position.

THIS is the reason for the real portion of the 1998-99 Lewinsky economic boom.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

simply a form of putting the wealthy in a special higher tax bracket. It is of course unfair, but also devious.

Unfair and devious is what Democrats do best . . . e.g., the "Social Security Trust Fund" which justifies the eternal entitlement of seniors--but which contains nothing but government IOU's for future taxpayers to redeem (never has the first dime of Payroll Tax Receipts been invested in anything that would help those future taxpayers pay our benefits). 'Course any system to actually invest for the future would entail specific commitments of real resources, subject to profit or loss . . . and hence would be "a risky scheme."

[lewislynn]

The so called 'death tax' is also, double taxation.

That's for individuals, it doesn't count. We're only programmed to talk about how much the rich pay and taxes on investors and corporations around here.

[mdwakeup]

The old saying is "Whatever you tax you get less of." We can't tax liberals or snow...but here in the good ol' U S of A --- we tax savings, investment and productivity.

But usually not higher than we tax labor!

[mdwakeup]

Taxes on dividends could be eliminated at the individual level by excluding income from dividends. The kicker is that roughly half of all dividend payments go into tax-exempt accounts -- mostly to pension funds and tax-deferred IRAs.

In other words, only about half of dividends are really potentially subject to double taxation.

[The Raven]

We can cut the US budget in half tomorrow and see no change other than an improved economy.

[Question_Assumptions]

If this tax were removed, Microsoft might pay dividents, releasing come of the tens of billions of dollars of cash that they are sitting on (I've read that it is enough to buy the entire Airline industry).

[Agamemnon]

Title 26 has the info you need if you know how to read.

There's more to Title 26 than just giving it a read.

Truth and simplification in taxation are needed to get rid of all the small print.

If IRS agents can't comprehend it, how in all fairness is the average tax payer to make sense of it?

Do you have the time to educate your erstwhile adversary as he sits across that IRS audit table from you, or will you suggest a reading comprehension course for him too? Don't think you'll get too far.

[Agamemnon]

Good. Then why don't you go educate the IRS about the fair application of your Constitutional law and you may have actually accomplished something.

Of course, as I read all that other blather on your site to which you directed me, particularly noting the gall you have to imply that Lincoln was gay, I quickly realized that I was just reading more mal-informed garbage from some Southern-grudge yahoo, who doesn't have enough on the ball to know who won the Civil War and why.

It would make any reader seriously wonder what it is that you do know, but not feel overly obligated to waste their time bothering to find out.