Good grief.. Yet another lie. Yet another straw man argument.

THERE IS NO 3.8% TAX ON ALL REAL ESTATE TRANSACTIONS.

How gullible ARE some of you people that you'll latch onto ANYthing without checking your sources? Ten seconds on Snopes finds this:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/realestate.asp

That 3.8% tax is a *MEDICARE* Tax, for starters - not a sales tax. The tax is on CAPITAL GAINS, for another. On top of that, it's on PROFIT of ABOVE $500,000. So if you made a PROFIT of $501,000 - you would pay a tax of $38. That $500,000 is TAX FREE because of the homeowner exclusion that you can now take MULTIPLE TIMES in your life (it used to be a one-time only deal)

And, of course, you're aware that it's not just as simple as "I bought my house for $50,000 and sold it for $600,000". If you paid $10,000 for new windows 20 years ago, your 'purchase price' is now $60,000. You get to include all that stuff you do in home improvements and repairs. In my case, just over the past few years I've put some $50,000 in my house and we're looking at more later on.

So that "tax on all real estate transactions" is actually a Medicare tax on capital gains over $500,000.


So, DDoug, that example of having to pay $3800 when you sold your house for $100,000 is flat out WRONG. You'd have to get a house for FREE and sell it for $600,000 in order to pay that much tax.

I mean the following in all sincerity - DDoug - where did you hear this and is there a reason you didn't check it?