From an investment newsletter:
Komrade Obama is going to tax your gold.
I'm sure it'll come out that many new taxes were sneaked into the recently passed 2,300-page health care law. One of them will apply to those selling gold coins. The new tax law says every time a business buys anything that costs more than $600, it has to be reported to the government.
If you sell $600 or more in gold to your coin dealer, it'll have to be reported... so it can be taxed. The government hopes to rake in $17 billion over the next 10 years from the new tax.
This will crush small businesses. Dealers often buy gold from one another. Those transactions will all have to be reported and taxed. But it's worse than that...
Customers sell gold to dealers regularly. Pat Heller, a coin dealer in Michigan, says he deals with maybe 1,000 customers a week and will have to fill out anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 new tax forms a year. Heller says he'll have to hire two full-timers just to track all this crap.
How much do you want to bet Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorganChase start getting into the gold-coin business in a big way? They already have the personnel to handle the paperwork, and they have more money than God to pay a new tax.
Never mind for a moment this was added to a health care law. This is a pristine example of how the system works. The masses and media clamor for more regulation. The government is happy to oblige. Big businesses get a larger competitive advantage from the new regulation... and small businesses and individuals get screwed.
This doesn't really concern me, since I buy gold and never sell it. But it concerns me that many mom-and-pop coin dealers will be put out of business since they won't be able to deal with the new regulatory burden.
Looking ahead, no matter what the Supreme Court has decided recently, I promise you Komrade Obama is trying to figure out how to get your guns away from you. It's hard to get control of people who have the ability to shoot back.