Yeah, that was pretty much my thought unless you assigned every year an "index value" without regard to the day of the year. Thus a holding period of 1/1/2008 to 12/31/2011 would be treated the same as 12/31/2008 to 1/1/2011, even though the latter was barely half as long.
I don't actually care whether CGs and dividends go up.. I just believe the path forward requires cuts and taxes. We were doing fine before the 1981 cuts and don't appear to have improved with them. I think the wealth gap was rapidly widening with dividends and CGs were 20% - so double hits, drags, whatever the wealthy were doing just fine.
Something along the lines of letting all of the tax cuts expire when the economy stabilizes. Alas, I am not optimistic. I think we will break things worse than they are and nobody but the upper 5-10% will come out thriving.
Before the 1986 tax reforms, of course, the highest brackets were often never seen by the wealthy because of the almost unlimited ability to shelter income. So one who supports higher taxes really can't talk about the "glory days" of 70-90% top tax brackets -- I believe it was JFK who pushed the reduction of the top bracket from 90% to 70% -- without also recalling all the shelters which led to some folks legally paying zero income tax on million dollar incomes.
If anyone is doing a lot of buying and selling they have to keep track of all those trades anyway (date bought/date sold, etc). I doubt there are many folks doing that manually anymore, and the set of people doing that manually who also do their taxes with pencil and on paper forms has got to be tiny. If they want to enjoy that pain, then they should be free to do so.
Not in Lake Wobegone.
I just can't help being this way! Oh well, sorry.
Usually IME when people say "average", they are thinking of the mean. Some of us thought that 50% of the population have incomes below the median income. It could be both in some cases, for example if the income distribution fit a perfect Gaussian distribution (bell curve) so that the median and mean income were identical.
Don't forget the mode.
I don't actually care whether CGs and dividends go up.. I just believe the path forward requires cuts and taxes. We were doing fine before the 1981 cuts and don't appear to have improved with them. I think the wealth gap was rapidly widening with dividends and CGs were 20% - so double hits, drags, whatever the wealthy were doing just fine.
Bottom line, we can afford national health care and a modest social security safety net with the 1% continuing to thrive. It will admittedly involve some substantial health care reforms (which I don't see coming soon). It will also require some sacrifice by the "normal well off" within the 99% (e.g. my current level now that I am ERd)
I wish you'd stop being shy about sharing your opinions, especially when they're caustic...
I wouldn't count them out just yet, though they may well slide off into oblivion. It would not surprise me if objections to 'too big to fail' and/or campaign finance reform (far too much political influence bought by the .01%) aren't widely held even majority views. Whether OWS champions either or both is an open question.
Midpack said:
Agreed. But I don't know that the stupid slogans ("talking points") all political candidates rely on are any more intelligent than many protesters...
+1!
