Today in the Taxosphere

Interesting Tax blog links from around the Internet:

• MauledAgain wants a “greed tax”: The tax would apply when a person’s or entity’s attempt to accumulate wealth, rather than “trickling down” benefits to society generally, harms society. Since ’society’ is made up of individuals, not all of whom are harmed by such actions, this sounds like a reinvention of the Tort system.
• David Zaring at Conglomerate is grudgingly happy that bailouts are playing by the rules again. He wonders if they might even get retroactive Congressional approval for earlier bailouts. I think the latter is likely — once Congress says we should spend our tax dollars a certain way in the future, it should be easy to convince them that we should have spent that way in the past.
• alorasalia at AnswerBag wants to know if paying higher taxes is patriotic. The easy answer is the currently top-rated theory that if paying less taxes than you owe is bad, paying more taxes must be good. Of course, this theory allows you to conclude that if shoplifting is wrong, rampant consumerism is a moral imperative.
• Silicon Valley Blogger at the Digerati Life rhetorically asks where to invest after the stock market tanks and, refreshingly, says to hold on to the same stocks as before.
• Kay Bell at Don’t Mess With Taxes has some income tax statistics that may shock you. Apparently Obama and McCain intend to make history their first term.