In "The Dow has recovered, but what about 'The Doug?'" 2012-09-03, Jim Hightower wrote:
"[T]oday's corporate and political leaders are wretchedly-bad gardeners – by tending to the moneyed elites and ignoring America's workaday majority, they're watering the weeds and pulling the flowers. Where's that going to lead us?"
One of the ways that this is done is taxing dividends at a lower rate than wages. If we tax dividends at a lower rate to encourage investment, do we discourage work by taxing labor at a higher rate? Would anybody get dividends if there weren't people to do the work to generate those dividends?
Maybe I shouldn't complain. I am retired and derive a portion of my income from dividends and capital gains. But how hard am I working to do that? As for the dividends, my work consists either of having requested reinvestment by a financial institution or by typing a request to have accumulated dividends transferred to my bank account.
Sure, I'd like to pay less taxes, wouldn't we all? But if we don't pay taxes, would we have any kind of civil society?
