worthless major media avoids the truthto conitinue the spin on Bush's war, note that the major media only interview those that voted for the original resolution Fall 2002. Isn't that just dandy: Heres are those that did...
The biggest tax break for the rich is the rolling back of the Dividends tax rate. Until the Clinton Administration, Dividends and Capital Gains had their own tax rates considerably lower than Income tax rates. In the guise of Tax Simplification, they were indexed to the standard income tax rates.
GOP Breaks New FundRaising RecordGOP Breaks New Fund-Raising Record Wednesday, October 01, 2003 WASHINGTON - The Republican Party has reached a milestone in its record fund raising: 1 million...
That had the unintended consequence of deprecating the value of dividends in favor of capital gains. While dividends are usually small in comparison to stock prices, capital gains, thanks to margin buying, can, in a bull market, equal or exceed capital investment. This created a volatile situation into which came the internet. Promising huge capital gains while not even having a plan for profits which could be shared as dividends, investors madly poured their money into worthless businesses, buoyed on irrational exuberance.
The heirs of the Hormel fortune sued their trustees to sell their Hormel stock, stock in a company still making profits and sharing them with its investors, so that they too could throw their money at empty promises.
Just look at the performance of the top dividend producing stocks in the nineties. Jobs at almost all of them declined sharply as they cut payrolls in the hope of juicing up their stock prices.
While Microsoft, which never shared its wealth with its shareholders, preferring to build a war chest to monopolize its industry, boomed. the share prices of companies like 3M drooped. 3M was pushed into a series of bad choices, first cutting off a third of their company and its synergistic creativity by divesting Imation, then into overthrowing the storied 3M culture. One could just see the Wall Street geniuses writing themselves memos on Post-It(TM) Notes: "Bash 3M Culture", without even recognizing the irony. So now, a company whose unique culture gave us a universe of marvellous products will soon be like every other crap butt company in America. It's already begun, as 3M talent is forced into early retirement, or simply eliminated and replaced by H1-B visa holders on short leashes, or had their work outsourced to India.
The restoration of the Dividend Tax Rate is the most important domestic legislation of the Bush presidency and the one most likely to preserve American jobs.
Dan Mercer