Grab bag of tax proposals

The tax code should have an income tax exemption for veterans, so $600 for each year of service up to a maximum of 5 years.  Often veterans give up more than they realize.  The people that don't serve are often further along in their careers when veterans begin their non-military working career - a head start that may make it almost impossible for the Veteran to ever make up the lifetime income gap.  That sacrifice should be recognized in the tax code.


We should raise taxes on the wealthy, in particular stop encouraging rampant speculation and asset bubbles with low capital gains taxes.  But we should also bring back income averaging, so those people who first hit the big strike can keep more of the income than those whose high income is a long term phenomanen.


Any organization that is granted limited liability should have to abide by a salary standard - mean, median and Mode - across the range of all employees.

Labor relations shouldn't be adversarial

Labor relations in the US are built on an adversarial basis.  Labor against management.  This seems counterproductive to me.  In virtually every other aspect of business we strive to build teams, not encourage adversarial relationships.  It is sort of like a football coach on a road trip pitting his linemen against his ball handling players to negotiate who sleeps in a motel and who sleeps on the bus, and then expecting them to go out and play as a team in the game.

We didn't develop an adversarial system intentionally.  Nobody figured out the best way to encourage productivity and competitiveness, then devised a system to make it work.  It is an accident of history.  Business people were allowed to exploit men, women and children for competitive advantage.  When the exploitation got really bad, the workers rebelled and formed unions to protect themselves.

Unions are not a really a good solution for the problem of worker exploitation.  Unions have a history of abuse by their management, they have a history of being oblivious to the health of the underlying enterprise, and many people don't like be forced to join a union to work.

We should use tax policy to encourage companies to organize themselves as teams in a way that makes unions irrelevant.  Create a qualification mechanism - if the payroll structure spreads the company wealth fairly (mean, median and Mode) and grants employees's a say on working conditions, the company can qualify to pay a lower corporate tax rate.

Qualifying for a lower tax rate will be very attractive to investors, since it makes a bigger pie available for them to take a piece of, and a little side benefit of qualification is it will reduce the ability of CEO's to use their power over the Corporation to extract excessive salaries and golden parachutes.