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How about abolishing the income tax and replacing it with a wealth tax. All funds which are not spent on consumption or else converted into non-financial assets within 12 months of receipt would be taxed at 100%, preventing any accumulation of liquid wealth. That would probably stop people and businesses from earning all this superfluous money in the first place. Earn what you want, but spend what you earn . . .

Some long-term financial strategy to beat the Taxman?

One of the most well-known results of general equilibrium economics is that a Walrasian equilibrium is pareto-efficient. That is, if you take an economy with many consumers (whose preferences and "initial endowments" are known) and many profit-maximising firms (whose technologies are known) and have them interact through complete frictionless markets that the resulting equilibrium will be such that no agent can be made better off without making another agent worse off. This result is seized upon by advocates of free markets who use it to make the claim that markets result in welfare-efficient outcomes, that markets are allocationally-efficient.However, pareto-efficiency is not a sufficient criterion for a "desirable" outcome. Passing laws against slavery is (was) "desirable" but had the effect of making slaves better off at the expense of slave-owners, thereby sacrificing Pareto-optimality. For this reason, advocates of death taxes seize on a second result of general-equilibrium economics, which is that the equilibrium outcome will be determined by the initial endowments of wealth of the agents in the economy. The idea is that death taxes be used to adjust the initial endowments in order to reach a more "desirable" equilibrium.The irony is that the argument for death taxes only works if you subscribe to the same crazy assumptions that you need to believe that free-markets provide all the answers. That is, the free-marketeers and Bill Gates' father are both standing on the same intellectual foundations. Unfortunately these foundations are rickety in the extreme. For example, they rely on the assumptions of complete markets i.e. that there exist today markets for all goods and all services for delivery in all states of the world in all locations on all future dates. To put this into concrete terms, this means that not only can your tailor quote you a price today for a two-piece suit for delivery in London in six weeks time, but that he can also quote you a price today for the same suit for delivery in Bermuda in 30 years time contingent on your waist size being between 36 and 38 inches and the temperature being below 90 degrees in the shade. And to give credence to the allocational efficiency of markets you need to believe that it's not just your tailor that is capable of performing this trick; you also need your grocer, your shoemaker, your barber and so on to be able to do the same thing. Formally, if there are n possible states of the world at any time, and there are s possible times in the future, then you need to believe that there exist (n+s) liquid futures markets in order to believe in the allocational efficiency of free-markets. So if there are 14,600 days left in my life and there are - invent a number - 1000 possible states of the world each day, then you need there to exist 15,600 liquid futures markets to place your trust in free-markets. In practice, by the time you've counted all the different delivery months trading now, you might get a total of a few hundred markets. Certainly far short of the required total!As soon as you start claiming that there are missing markets, the whole intellectual edifice falls apart. The first thing that disappears is the uniqueness of equilibrium. When markets are incomplete there arise a plethora of possible equilibria. The equilibrium path that transpires is the result of historical accident, of institutional design and mishap and of political whim. It is certainly not the unique pareto-efficient outcome beloved by the free-marketeers. This results in the collapse of both of the welfare results cited above. Not only will the equilibrium not be pareto-efficient, but it also will not be uniquely determined by initial endowments. When you remove the assumption of complete markets, you end up with the likelihood that most markets will more-or-less reach reasonable equilibrium paths but that some markets will not, i.e. that some markets will fail. An instance of market failure might be the US labour markets of the 1930's. This market failure - either to reach an equilibrium at all or to reach a "desirable" equilibrium - can be remedied under some circumstances by government intervention. In conclusion (1) it's always funny to see the free-marketeers squabble with the death-tax crew because they are both singing from the same ludicrous song-sheet and (2) it's funny how both sides persist in singing from this song-sheet despite the practical evidence from every day life that markets can and do fail and despite the reams of theoretical literature explaining how and when failure will occur. EDIT: What ever happened to Farmer?

Quantie...what is this Nigerian e-mail deal in the cartoon? I keep receiving some crap from a aide of some Nigerian miliatry leader who wants someone with resources to help him out in return of $$$$. And it's not just me...everyone in the math department at my University keep getting this junk.

QuoteOriginally posted by: supernaut20Quantie...what is this Nigerian e-mail deal in the cartoon? I keep receiving some crap from a aide of some Nigerian miliatry leader who wants someone with resources to help him out in return of $$$$. And it's not just me...everyone in the math department at my University keep getting this junk.He just wants your bank account number so that he may do some direct debits out of your account. But seriously it seems there are morepeople falling to this scam than rationality would have us believe. Here is one linkand this is a new development Spamarchive where they are cataloging, the standard spam techniques.

---------But seriously it seems there are more people falling to this scam than rationality would have us believe.-----------Money makes the world go around ANDA fool and his money soon go apart You should have known as finance professionals the fear and greed are the strongest emotions and can move whole markets!!