Couldn’t Help But Notice (011708)
According to a Wall Street Journal op-ed today by Richard Rahn, Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s tax-reform proposal includes indexing of capital gains for inflation.
Good for Rudy. I’ve covered this before but examples that make the point need to be brought up again and again until people get it. Here’s Rahn’s:
Assume you purchased a common stock in a company in 1984 for $100 a share and sold it in 2007 for $200 a share. Have you received any “income” from the sale of the shares of stock? The IRS would say “yes,” but this is clearly wrong. The IRS will claim that you had a $100 per share capital gain on the stock in the above example, yet actually the increase was solely a result of inflation. Because you cannot buy more goods and services with $200 now than you could have with $100 in 1984, you have had no “income” or wealth accretion.
Yet you owe capital-gains tax on that fictitious $100 “gain.” That is, and always has been, horse manure.
______________________________________________
Apple, with its movie download service and its ultrathin laptop, is definitely on the move.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Vista, which corporate users stubbornly, and unfortunately justifiably, are shunning, continues to hold back productivity growth, to the point where I believe it is harming the economy.
Some of the companies avoiding Vista like the plague should seriously consider thinking different, if you know what I mean.
______________________________________________
A lot has been made of Glenn Beck’s harrowing hospital experience a few weeks ago. Read up on it here if you aren’t familiar with the story.
Beck has the prescription for preventing future occurrences right, but misses the cause:
“The politicians are right that we have a health care crisis in this country,” he said. “Where they’re wrong is that it’s not going to be solved by government, it’s not going to be solved by getting the HMOs out, it’s not going to be solved by a new marbled-lobby health center,” he said. “It’s by hiring people that understand about caring for people.”
But the reason that the people in health care don’t care as much is because the government has gotten too involved in health care. The resulting bureaucracies in the government and forced on care providers have brought the “compassion” (i.e., lack of it) found at the post office and drivers’ license bureau into the examination room and the hospital ward. Reducing government involvement and getting more people in the profession who have strong Judeo-Christian ethics would go a long way.
________________________________________________
Proving that it’s never been “count all the votes,” but instead “count only MY votes’ — John Fund, in a Wall Street Journal column, boils down the Hillary Clinton campaign’s vote-suppression efforts in Nevada’s upcoming caucuses:
it’s still breathtaking to see how some Democrats ignore that it was only last week they argued before the Supreme Court that an Indiana law requiring voters show ID at the polls would reduce voter turnout and disenfranchise minorities. Nevada allies of Hillary Clinton have just sued to shut down several caucus sites inside casinos along the Las Vegas Strip, potentially disenfranchising thousands of Hispanic or black shift workers who couldn’t otherwise attend the 11:30 a.m. caucus this coming Saturday.
D. Taylor, the president of the Culinary Workers Union that represents many casino workers, notes that legal complaint was filed just two days after his union endorsed Barack Obama. He says the state teachers union, most of whose leadership backs Mrs. Clinton, realized that the Culinary union would be able to use the casino caucuses to better exercise its clout on behalf of Mr. Obama, and used a law firm with Clinton ties to file the suit.
….. the lawsuit has created an uproar among voters. It was the No. 1 issue among 30 Nevada Democrats participating in a Fox News focus group on Tuesday night; the anger among rank-and-file voters was palpable. The left-wing Nation magazine has denounced the suit as an attempt to “suppress the vote.”
The case goes before a federal judge in Las Vegas this morning.
With all due respect, Dem voters, where have you been? The Clinton-Gore axis controlling your party has been about the raw exercise of power over principles and the politics of intimidation for as long as I can remember. Now that they have turned their legal guns on rank and file party members in the name of preserving that power, you’re soooo surprised. How about soooo naive?
More info on the controversy, and the hypocrisy, can be found here, here, and here.
