[quote=flu]Wow… 170 total companies and counting….
You know you got some serious policy issue once you start seeing these things..
What’s gonna be really interesting is to see what happens when these fiscal cliff things kick in.
Me thinks we’re gonna have a bigger correction.. Folks in higher income brackets are gonna be pulling out this year…
Meanwhile, so what if these tax cuts are extended to middle class. If they stay invested during this time, me thinks their investments are gonna go south anyway. (And you know, you’re gonna have people that just do nothing all the way until jan 2013)…
And when the markets tank, oh boy that’s definitely gonna put a damper on the economy…
Anyway, that’s my prediction. And I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’ve never went to a significant short term money market position in retirement and post tax accounts before… I’m about 68% now.[/quote]
I think what the dividend accelerating thing will do is greatly increase government collections. Taxes on these dividends are all gonna be due by 4/15/13. Instead of at least a year later, or in some cases years and years later. (Costco is paying the equiv of 6 years dividends at once.) It could even be big enough to have a material effect on the annual budget.
We’ve been through these changes before, with big claims of how it was going to affect the market. It rarely does. It shouldn’t. Huge changes to tax treatment of real estate investments almost 30 years ago didn’t kill real estate, contrary to pedictions. Taxes on dividends will be higher for a small number of taxpayers. But that doesn’t, by itself, create some alternate investment opportunity that is now better than investing for dividends, when it wasn’t before. It doesn’t make real estate substantially better looking. It doesn’t make bonds suddenly better looking. If the lower taxes were the only reason for buying dividend paying stocks, then the difference between alternative investments was slight at best.
