I had hoped that the criticism you've had of government in the past years would not be partisan & would continue into this administration. But apparently you think it's moral to toss money at insolvent/failed institutions and to spend what we don't have in amounts that have never been seen before.

And then to imply that it's immoral to oppose such a budget is too much for me.

I'm sorry, but you've lost me as a reader.

I used to be a Sojo fan until they started acting like they were the
only progressive faith gig in town and developed a huge personality
cult around Wallis. I don't deny that the message is often right, but
it has indeed been said before by others out pounding the pavement
rather than looking for a media splash.

Who else used the phrase more than four years ago??

Is it possible for two persons to have the same thought??

Shame on you for twisting the facts.

We have to start with the truth. The wealthiest 1 percent of the population pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent. The bottom 50 percent pay 3 percent of the income taxes.

I think taxing investment transactions directly would have the undesirable effect of discouraging investment that DITE is concerned about. Taxing only the gains in value at the time of sale still helps discourage speculation without discouraging investment in the first place. Remember, if the investor never sells the asset, it is never taxed, no matter how much gain in value it has made.

“But they were lied to and the contract was tricky and hard to understand!” you may say. But I'm curious, if anybody is going to buy a home for, say, $50,000 and up (my hunch is these homes are mostly going for more than that), wouldn't it make sense, if you felt unsure you were understanding things properly, to hire a lawyer at $500 or $1,000 to confirm your suspicions and look after your best interest? I acknowledge and will agree that there are those who were preyed upon by lenders, but there are other considerations to take into account; why would those lenders lend to risky buyers if not given an incentive to make risky loans?

I think your description of “mass murder” is interesting. I used to be a “big defense” sorta guy, but now I'm seeing the folly. Good reference to Orwell!

I think this is an apt point, though I'm not quite so sure “conservative” is a good label for those opposing Obama's budget. Both conservatives and progressives alike want their own modicum of control over the lives and finances of others. Libertarians want no such thing but rule of law and protection of fraud and initiation of unwanted force.

Is there a logic for taxing gains instead of taxing transactions if it is the speculative/volatile investing we want to modearte?

Nehemiah was the governor of Judea. It seems the people in that area were in dire strait. One group were in desperate need of food, another group went into debt so as to buy food from Jeish nobles and a third went so far as to send their kids into slavery for the same reason. The second group, by the way, mortgaged their home to raise the money to buy the grains.

All three groups were being exploited by the nobles in that society. What did they do? They were charging interest on top of the loan payments. The interest was high enough so as to make it difficult or impossible to pay back what is owed.

Sound familiar?? I was thinking of the current housing and larger financial crisis. I already had compassion but my heart was crying out even more after reading the above bible passage. Nehemiah represented the government of his day and God used him as an instrument of righteousness and justice. He demanded that the nobles restore to the poor what was stolen.

I didn't stop at just reading the surface story. I looked for the underlying principles that were being violated here. The nobles were not supposed to be charging interests on their countrymen. In fact, they were not to take the person's home as their own or their cloaks as their own.

To be fair, the borrower is to pay back what is owed and yet isn't to be made nearly impossible.

Is mass murder moral? Obama proposes spending 52% of the discretionary budget for mass murder (virtually identical to the prior Administration) – what is called, in Orwellian doublespeak, “defense.” Can't Jim Wallis see anything wrong with that?

Are massive deficits, which serve to transfer money from ordinary people to investors, immoral? The budget proposed unprecedented deficit spending. Can't Jim Wallis see anything wrong with that?

And these things are closely related. A major reason for deficit spending is the obscene amounts we spend for wars and preparations for wars. Where is the prophetic voice against this? I remember the early days of Sojourners, joining them in protests at arms bazaars and the like. They once did have a prophetic voice. But that has seemed to take a back seat to cozying up to the powerful.

“The problem with our economy right now is a credit crunch, right? We need more investment expenditures to increase long term economic growth. So, the logical thing to do would be to make investment more attractive. Still with me? We could do this by making the price of investment cheaper. Government can do this by reducing the punishment it places on investment success. This could be done by a reduction in the capital gains tax. It's an easy and logical solution if you want the economy to do better, which liberals claim they want. But it seams this has become second priority of the Left after making sure the rich do worse.”

DITE and other lassaiz-faire folks here, I'll walk you through the logic of taxing capital gains.

One does not pay capital gains taxes on investing. One only pays capital gains taxes on investment gains after the investments are sold. So capital gains taxes do not discourage investment. What taxing capital gains does discourage is the very kind of overheated, speculative buying and selling of investment assets that is demonstrably one of the causes of the current financial meltdown.

When investors have to consider the tax consequences of selling any investment assets, investors will be encouraged to be more cautious and less speculative. Investors will be encouraged to conserve investment assets rather than exploit them; thus investors are encouraged to create and maintain a solid foundation for building true wealth instead of financial houses of cards.

Reasonable capital gains taxes that discourage speculation and encourage asset conservation should be seen as one means for reestablishing a solid, lasting prosperity.

Peace,
D

Um, he did…

As I mentioned above by citing the movie Pursuit of Happyness, there is precious little reason to be poor in America. Will it be difficult to get a good education if you're a latch-key kid who never knows when his next meal will come? Of course. I'm not naive. But it is not impossible.