ProShares UltraShort Real Estate Message Board

Actually I could care less which tweedle dee or tweedle doe political party is stumbling around the white house on a given year.

I bad president with terrible policies subtract 0.5% GDP growth a good one with excellent policies will add 0.5% GDP growth. But the trends for the market are set by events outside of Washingtoon (not a typo) DC not inside.

There are macro forces at work here that dwarf the government; from our arcane energy infrastructure that is ill equipped to handle the new peek oil reality, to the retirement of the baby boomers that will move 86 million people from working to retirement, to increased foreign competition from an increasingly "flat" world. These forces will produce problems that go beyond the scope of any one person to fix.

Obama or McCain?

Well, now that I am forced to choose ...

I'll actually go with McCain for one reason, he says he knows nothing about economics and thus will probably stay out of it. Normally one would think that would be a bad thing, especially during a recession or maybe something worse.

But when you have a government that can't even manage the Mexican border, it sends shivers down my spine thinking about what kind of brain dead pork barrel legislation will come out of washingtoon to "deal" with an economic downturn. Unfortunately, even though I think Obama overall is a better candidate he would pretend to be "whiley coyote super genius" from the road runner cartoons and build all kinds of complex legislative contraptions to catch the road runner (metaphor for the economy) which is faster more complex and nimble than this bungling stumbling government can even figure out. The results will be same ... the coyote gets blown up, falls over cliffs, gets squished into pieces.

A vote for McCain is a vote for gridlock. Gridlock is good. I love grid lock. With this government, nothing is always better than something.

Funny you should mention that.

REITs are a very specific tax struction designed to avoid double taxation of dividends. REITs pre-date and are independent of the Bush tax cuts.

What does this mean?

If the Bush tax cuts are repealed, all other dividends go back to being double taxed.

But NOT REITs.

To be more specific, REITs are a structure where if the company pays out 90% of their earnings in the form of a dividend, then those earnings are not taxed at the corporite level. When the Bush tax cuts came into existence, the whole point of the dividend tax cut was to reduce the double taxation on dividends. But since REITs were already NOT double taxed, the bush tax cuts did not apply to REITs. REIT dividends are still taxed as normal income.

So, if other companys go back to being taxed as normal income, and thereby go back to a double taxation, that will absolutly favor REITs in EVERY way.

First, people would no longer have a personal tax reason to favor other companys with "qualified dividends" over REITs.

Second, other dividend companys would likely cut their dividends because the dividends because the dividends would provide less shareholder value due to the increased double taxation. This again would push more yield seekers toward REITs.