Grover Norquist is a slimy lying bastard, and a guest on today's Fresh Air

Capital Gains taxes -- somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there an exemption - hasn't there been one for years - on capital gains taxes when you sell your house? He's claiming that somebody making $30k/year who sells his $100k house is getting an unfair tax hit. Might be interested to see some statistics on how many $30k householders are homeowners.

He's also claiming that to believe in progressive income taxation requires the same kind of moral belief system - treating a small group differently than the majority - that resulted in Hitler's holocost. What a crazy stupid evil bastard.

The core argument behind every single thing he asserts -- 'the government' is *not* 'us'. 'The government' is evil.

Acadia National Park was created in large part because the Rockefellers/Mellons, etc, could no longer afford their large summer estates following the introduction of income taxes. I guess since progressive income taxation requires the same kind of moral belief system ... that resulted in Hitler's holocost, they must be about the same.

Actually, the traffic gets pretty bad there now in the summer. :-)

with a noxious odor

Uh huh, sure. Because the first thing I think of when I pay taxes is "Damn, now I know what a Jew in Poland felt like in 1940."

Moronic hatemonger.

if his capital gain is over $500,000. Maybe those are the people he is talking about. LOL.

The homeowner has to have lived in the house for 2 of the last 5 years. I don't know if there are exceptions to this.

I believe there's also a one-time exemption from CGT if you trade down.

The logic here is pretty easy to see: no one normally sells their house so they can live on the street. (There is a Republican in the White House, so that may soon change.) You normally sell to trade up or to move somewhere else. As for the one-time tradedown, this is done when the kids leave home and you don't need as much house.

If you've got someone making $30k/year whose business is buying houses, fixing them up and selling them at a profit, he deserves to get hit with CGT. He also needs to wonder why he's working his ass off like this for only $30k/year.

The only thing the nasty ol' government has any business doing is -- national defense, law enforcement, and protecting property rights. He thinks the only reason we're a wealthy nation is because of property rights written into law. Evidently education, access to libraries, transportation infrastructure, investment in basic & applied research, and the ability to walk into an emergency room & get treatment if your life's in danger has absolutely nothing to do with our standard of living.

Whatta maroon. Whattan ignoranimus. Whatta nincompoop.

He's gone now. Think I'll go listen to last month's Krugman interview ( http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?displayValue=day&todayDate=02/25/2003 ) just to wash the stupid outta my ears.

...taking something to "its logical extreme."

By his reasoning, teaching you kids to share is teaching them to become mindless communistic automatons (a la Mao's Cultural Revolution or "grey Stalinist masses").

Come to think of it, his claque actually have argued that.

of the last five years, you can make up to $250,000( as a single person, $500,000 for a married couple) capital gains without paying taxes on it. Each and every two years.

There used to be exclusions for buying a house of same or greater value, with a one time tax free gain (which I think maxed out at $125,000), but right now a middle class person would be able to walk away with quite a hefty gain.

Those people who realize several million dollars on a house sale really ought not to be complaining about paying the taxes. Capital gains taxes are a maximum of what? 25% these days?

Here's a link to the IRS site: www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/ir02-142.pdf