The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 5 of 10)

Stanton Brown /p> p> DOUBLE TROUBLE : br> Re: Michael Craig's Nancy Drew a Blank on Bush's Economic Plan : /p> p>Michael, your analysis of double taxation misses the mark completely. With the taxation of corporate profits followed by the taxation of those same profits when they are distributed to the share-holder owners of the corporation as a personal income tax we have the same productive activity being taxed twice. Contrast this with a guy who owns a hot-dog stand and who lives off the profits of his business and is only taxed once. Now to suggest that your average prole who slaves for a wage on which he pays income tax and then has to pay sales tax on a hot dog, perhaps from our individual entrepreneur mentioned above, to give him energy to get back to work next day is being doubly taxed is confusing the issue completely. The productive output of his kulak boss's company and the cooking of the dog he consumes are totally separate economic activities and so can reasonably be expected to be taxed separately and individually. br> -- Basil Weir /p>

Mr. Craig keeps saying things like "encouraging companies to pay more in dividends diverts money from pro-growth activities like hiring workers and R&D." He's wrong.

When I get a dividend what the blazes do you think I do with it? Burn it? Tear it up? I spend it, either on donuts or a new investment. In either case it goes from an entity that does not quite have a use for it to one that does, right now, and even better the decision on where it goes is mine, mine, mine. And after I've spent it, what do you suppose the recipients will do? The whole sequence moves money where it is actually needed, not where the dividend holding management thinks it ought to go.

topics:
Taxes, John McCain, Nancy Pelosi, Business, Religion, Hollywood, Constitution, Military, Iraq, NATO, Energy