Fair taxes - How taxes on Capital should be structured

If one assumes that all income should be taxed equally so people share the burden of expense of government equally here is how taxes on Capital should be structured:


Dividends should be treated as ordinary income (as they used to be before the Bush tax cuts).  They are distributed profits from a business and there is no reason to give them favorable tax treatment.


Capital Gain should also be treated as ordinary income.  But there should be two special provisions, one for fairness purposes and one to encourage investment.


For fairness gain should be reduced by how long you held the asset to account for inflation.


To encourage investment you should be allowed to sell an asset and immediately roll the proceeds over into a new asset.  All the rollover proceeds would not be taxed, and you would carry the same basis into the new asset (basis is how much of your own money you originally put in).  This would need rules to ensure it is not abused, particularly when you are using borrowed money to buy an asset.

Income inequality

Heard an interview of author Edward Conard, a Bain Capital guy, who has written a book called "Why Everything you Have Been Told About the Economy is Wrong".   The interview focused on what is apparently his main thesis, that income inequality is a good thing.  In the interview it seemed the crux of his argument was that we are richer than Germany or Japan, and we have greater income inequality, therefore the reason we are richer is because the investor class in Germany and Japan are more highly taxed.


His argument in the interview did not address some pretty basic facts, so it makes me wonder if he addresses issues like:


1.  He seemed to be focused on the period since WW II, does he address that time in our history that is most like our current situation, the roaring twenties and the Great Depression?  Where we had rising income inequality and then an housing and finance based collapse that led to years of economic weakness.


2.  In citing Germany and Japan does he address the fact we started from different places?  At the end of WW II our country, our infrastructure and manufacturing capability were untouched, and in fact had been pumped up on steroids by the war.  In Germany and Japan, on the other hand, the major cities were piles of rubble, big chunks of their infrastructure were destroyed and their manufacturing base was in tatters.  We had a huge economic head start and the fact we are still are richer says nothing about our economy beyond the fact we have avoided catastrophe and kept moving forward.


2.  Does he address population distribution?  Because of our success in WW II we had a ton of kids between 1947 and 1957, the so called baby boomers.  No such event occurred in Germany or Japan (or the rest of the world as far as I know).  A result of that explosion in the number of children meant that in the period from the late 1970's through the early 2000's we had an extraordinarily high percentage of our population in what economists consider the prime productive years - the time of our life we we create a lot of wealth and build our financial life.  The simple fact is if 5 out of every 10 people are in that time of life in country #1, that country is going to be richer than country 2 where only 4 out of 10 are in that period of life.


Perhaps he deals with these issues in his book.  I'm sure the Economist will review it soon, unless that review suggests he deals with issues like these I will see no reason to read the book.