No. I think that's exactly right. These broad-based measures create a lot of unintended consequences and, frankly, unintended beneficiaries—or perhaps intended—when you use them.
As we said at the beginning, a tax regime can't do everything about everything. It can do a lot about equity and fairness. Any measure that is relatively modest and increases to some modest extent equity and fairness actually does more for the economy than the alleged prices.
I'll say one final thing. To those who say, “Well, it's going to make people leave the country,” or “It's going to affect investment decisions in a major way,” yes, moving out of the country is always an alternative. If you want to go and hunt down a lower tax rate, you always have that option if your capital is mobile. On the other hand, for people like me, what do you think I'm going to do about this increase as an alternative to generate a better return, since I will still get a privileged return from the dividends and the lower tax rate?
For most people, there's simply no viable option, even if we don't like it. Even if I don't like paying more money, I'm still going to invest in exactly the same way because it's still a better deal tax-wise. It's probably, as Ms. Miller said, still an unfair deal, and only slightly less unfair in my favour.
