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Doctors, lawyers, and other paycheck people making $250k pay around the 35% rate. They get hit hard. Meanwhile, professional investors earning the same amount p
by bwh2 17y ago
Doctors, lawyers, and other paycheck people making $250k pay around the 35% rate. They get hit hard. Meanwhile, professional investors earning the same amount pay the capital gains rate of 15%, which is less than a paycheck family earning $80k. I don't want paycheck people to pay more taxes, I want the capital gains rate to go up.
- ryanwaggoner 17y agoYeah, let's disincentive the wealthy to invest in new companies that create jobs during a recession. Excellent. I much prefer the idea floated to ditch capital gains altogether for small companies.
- bwh2 17y agoSo you should be in favor of dropping capital gains to 0% then for everyone, right? Probably income tax too for that matter, because that discourages people from working, and unemployment is the last thing we want to have.
- ryanwaggoner 17y agoActually, yes. I prefer a flat tax on consumption.
- bwh2 17y agoFair enough. I also prefer a consumption tax, not flat though. But if we're going to have an income-based tax, I'd rather have all types of income treated/taxed equally.
- pdxgene 17y agoSomewhat counterintuitively, raising the capital gains rate actually tends to decrease overall capital gains receipts. This is mostly due to the fact that capital gains realizations are some of the easiest to time, and if advantageous, defer. This is a natural consequence of a convoluted system with complicated rules that encourage schemes. Another sad consequence of this system is that, as with our managed health care system, it creates a massive amount of regulatory and managerial overhead. The engineer in me would love to see a flat tax, and the resultant elimination of layers of bureaucracy, like the chopping out of so many lines of unnecessary code. Dare to dream...