AP fact checks Buffett tax claims

[BCEagle91]

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<p>This is classic statistical noise, it is claiming causal link
between two statistics, and that is they have low unemployment, must
be because they have no capital gains…and that is bogus,
because there are countries with no capital gains who are in deep
trouble.</p>

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<p>Who said anything about statistics. I made no causal claim; your
strawman did.</p>

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<p>Hong Kong and Singapore’s economies are different then ours.</p>

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<p>Singapore has claimed to learn the best practices from other countries.</p>

<p>Singapore has no natural resources and has to compete with China. They
government regularly runs a surplus and returns money to its citizens
when stimulus is needed. They have eclectic systems - the government
has control over various things and they leave other things to the
marketplace. The idea is to do what works. So they have things like
no homelessness, 2% unemployment and 3% of GDP for healthcare.</p>

<p>And no capital gains taxes.</p>

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<p>We could cut the capital gains tax rate to 0 in this country, and I
am pretty sure all it would do is make speculative trading and the
like even more prevalent, more funny money, and few jobs would be
created (the capital gains tax rate cut to 15% is basically not
credited with creating many jobs, during the period in question the
net on jobs was a major loss of them)</p>

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<p>In Singapore, you can open up a hawker stall and you can potentially
do better than the kids getting college educations. Their environment
seems to make setting up businesses pretty easy.</p>