> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > This has to be taken with a grain of salt: if you sell some stock > to pay for a house addition, the stock sale is not counted as > income, by the US government, but the house addition is counted as > spending. > It depends on which government entity is doing the counting. If the IRS is doing the counting, it's income. If the Department of Manufactured Crises is doing the counting, then it's not. The government uses two different standards for deciding who's rich and who's poor, who's spending and who's saving. One standard is for figuring out how high to raise taxes, and by that standard everyone is rich. The other is for figuring out how much money the gummit needs to spend to help "the poor," and by that standard everyone is poor. For example, when the gummit is giving out income figures is discussions of what tax rates should be, any homeowner is deemed to have an "imputed income," which is the amount of money he'd get if he rented out his house and lived in his car. I am not making this up. On the other hand, when talking about how many "poor people" need a Federal handout, the "poor" include people who own $100,000 houses free and clear with no mortgage. So everyone is both rich and poor, depending on what branch of gummit you talk to, and it's not surprising that the same, uh, "standards" apply to savings/spending rates. ---------------------- Was this two cents worth? http://two-cents-worth.com/?101313 --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
