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A prevailing opinion among way too many people is tax policy should be concerned with the "fairness" of wealth distribution in a society. We've heard it from President Obama's own lips, he wants to increase the capital gains tax rates in the interest of "fairness".

Recently on Twitter, I saw this tweet...

Starting in 2001, I was telling my readers to prepare for the coming recession. I not only told them a housing bust was coming but how to profit from it. Not only why all equity markets were going to experience a massive correction but that the housing market would severely lag the recovery that would follow. I explained why the historical near full employment would not continue.

This isn't a trivial question, especially in today's economy. Who owns the job you perform in exchange for pay?

Most people say, "my job" when they are talking about the job they do. But, if it really is yours, why don't you have more control over it?

Do you get to decide where you perform your duties? How about when you do them?

Do you get to decide how much you get paid for doing your job?

See? It isn't really your job, is it? But, you probably want to keep it.

The best way to do that is to increase your value to your employer. If you can become the goto guy or gal in one or more subject areas critical to the success of your employer, you will be able to keep your employer's job for as long as you want.

One of the first steps in figuring out how you can increase your value to your employer is to create a Career Map

The use of the terms "conservative" and "liberal" aren't all that descriptive today. Yes, I call myself a conservative but I am really more of a Constitutionalist than anything. However, in today's political climate "conservative" and "liberal or progressive" are used to describe ones position on a range of issues. But, being a conservative or a liberal does not mean you are conservative or liberal on every single issue.

Did you hear it? Maybe you felt it? The US and World economies experienced a seismic shift due to a perfect storm of economic and political conditions. This shift brought forth a fundamental change to economies across the globe. Things and conditions are different now and they aren't going back to the “way things were” any time soon.

For many years, I have encouraged anyone wanting to invest in real estate to build an organization and get to the point where their income from it is passive. I have encouraged them to either grow an organization of employees or build a strong network of independent third party professionals to handle the stuff they could not do or did not want to do. I made strong arguments for them not wanting to do much of the details and focus on building a solid, sustainable business.

Today, Congress is very likely to pass health care reform. One of the myriad of things in there are a whole host of new taxes. One of those new taxes directly affects every single real estate investor in this country and signals a much bigger threat on the horizon. See buried in the reconciliation package written by the House is language imposing a 3.9% Medicare tax on passive income, "from any source what so ever". The income test triggering the tax is troubling too but that is likely to be corrected to follow the AGI model for other triggers in the tax code.

There is a very real possibility the House of Representatives will push through the current health care take over legislation.

I am not going to discuss whether this is good or bad for the average person. I am not going to discuss whether the mandate provisions are Constitutional. (They aren't but the challenges will have to wind their way through the court before being settled by SCOTUS.)

I am going to talk about what small and medium businesses face as a result of the passage of this legislation.

Long time readers of this blog will notice something different. That is because I pulled the blog back into the REITactics site. A number of years ago, the blog was pulled out and given its own space. It went through several titles and themes and I always struggled balancing what went on the blog and what went elsewhere. It was more than just who could read the whole article or even see it for that matter. It was a struggle between building a wall between the blog and other sites and freely linking between them.

I have really been struggling with a couple of things over the last few weeks. Probably the most pressing one is whether I allow the tools we use internally to be released to a wider audience. On one hand, I like to help other investors and all... but... on the other hand, I know these tools give my partners and I a competitive advantage.