Various justifications for lower capital-gains rates have been proffered over the years, none of them self-evident. But even conceding the wisdom of lower capital-gains rates, why should they never be taxed at all, even as they are passed from generation to generation?
We're paying maybe 25 percent of the income tax, but the payroll tax is over a third of the receipts of the federal government. And they don't take that from me on capital gains. They don't take that from me on dividends.
Legislation to create a new 10 percent tax bracket, reduce the marriage penalty, cut the tax rate on dividends and capital gains, and increase the child tax credit have been essential elements in this economic expansion.
You don't need to raise taxes on rich people, because they create capitalization and investment. But you need to tax speculation - meaning capital gains.
What I do is allow middle-income families to finally be able to save their money tax-free. No tax on interest dividends or capital gains for middle-income Americans.
Every time we've cut the capital gains tax, the economy has grown. Whenever we raise the capital gains tax, it's been damaged. It's one of those taxes that most clearly damages economic growth and jobs.
We need to cut the capital gains tax; we need to take regulations off the backs of business and allow banks to once again lend.
To focus capital and entrepreneurship into empowering innovation, we should change is the capital gains tax rate. We would be better served by a regressive tax rate, that would become progressively smaller the longer the investment is held.
I wish more people knew that the only one of the three main parties where not a single MP flipped from one property to the next, and not a single MP avoided capital-gains tax, where every single London MP did not claim a penny of second-home allowance, was the Liberal Democrats.
A tax on capital is self-defeating, in that it slows down capital accumulation, investment and economic growth.
I believe capital gains, for the most part, should be taxed the same way we tax income from hard work, sweat, and toil. And if we do those things, we can be a country that actually can afford debt-free college again.
When you tax capital gains income, you don't help the economy, you hurt the economy, which is why President Kennedy, President Reagan, President Clinton and President Bush all believed we should have a lower rate for capital gains.
I'd like to help struggling homeowners who can't pay their mortgages, I'd like to invest in our crumbling infrastructure, I'd like to reform the tax system so multimillionaires can't pretend their earnings are capital gains and pay at the rate of 15 percent. I'd like to make public higher education free, and pay for it with a small transfer tax on all financial transactions. I'd like to do much more - a new new deal for Americans. But Republicans are blocking me at every point.
I can tell you what happens to countries that go bankrupt. I've been to Argentina. I'm familiar with the history of Mexico and Great Britain. We'll see the same things here shortly: inflation, huge tax increases, capital flight and, eventually, capital controls.
Tax incentives might spur hiring in the short run, but how lasting are those gains if the jobs expire with the tax credits and they come at the expense of investing in the new technologies of the future?
If no estate tax is imposed, capital gains taxes can be avoided indefinitely.
My tax plan will cut taxes for 95 percent of workers, because we need to put money back into the pockets of struggling middle-class families and close the egregious tax loopholes that have exploded over the last eight years. My plan eliminates capital gains taxes entirely for the small businesses and start-ups that are the backbone of our economy, as opposed to John McCain's plan, which would tax these businesses. John McCain is running to serve out a third Bush term. But the truth is, when it comes to taxes, that's not being fair to George Bush.
If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary's. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.
No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.
I'll give you a simple formula for straightening out the problems of the United States. First, you tax the churches. You take the tax off of capital gains and the tax off of savings. You decriminalize all and tax them same way as you do alcohol. You decriminalize . You make gambling legal. That will put the budget back on the road to recovery, and you'll have plenty of tax revenue coming in for all of your social programs, and to run the army.
I think if you had a capital-gains system where the long, patient capital would actually be rewarded, nanosecond capital turning would not be.
Lobbyists know that a 0 percent tax rate on capital income is not, in fact, the lowest possible rate. There can be negative tax rates. There can be subsidies. There can be allowances for depreciation. Lobbyists are adaptive creatures.
The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital... the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy.
The capital gains tax is 15 percent now. So I sit there in my office and I make a lot of money by capital gains, and I pay 15 percent, and I pay no payroll tax on it.
We must end the iniquitous multi-taxing of the same money. It is not right to tax people's incomes, then their savings on that income, to tax the movement of assets through capital gains tax, stamp duty and tax them again through inheritance tax if they have the audacity to die.
There is an old adage that the quickest way to drop your tax take is to increase taxes. If capital gains tax is going to be 50 percent, my contingent capital gains tax is going to be 250 million pounds.
I will promote savings and investment by maintaining the 15% rate on capital gains and dividends. I will eliminate the tax entirely for those with annual income below $200,000.
Tax laws favor capital over labor, giving capital gains a lower rate than ordinary income. The rich get humongous mortgage interest deductions while renters get no deduction at all.
I would favor three policies: raising the minimum wage to $12, closing the tax loophole where persons only pay a 15% income tax on long term capital gains (tax it at the full tax rate), and institute a progressive tax moving the highest tax rate from 39.6% to 45%. I would favor implementing these three policies in that order, starting with raising the minimum wage, but not stopping there.
We want to keep a preferred rate for capital gains - we think it is important to encourage investment.
I'd like to give zero out capital gains tax and zero out the dividends tax, zero out alternative minimum tax, and zero out the death tax.
The tax on capital gains in Canada is twice as high as in communist China and we wonder why our ideas are being held back.
The biggest revenue target is the preferential rate for long-term capital gains, which raises a perennial question: Why should capital income be taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income? Capital assets are owned overwhelmingly by the rich.
There are many people who think we should have zero tax on capital gains, interest and dividends for everybody, as - the very, very wealthy. But recognize that means that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would pay no income tax at all. And some people say, 'Well, that's a good thing for growth of the economy.'
Make no mistake, the point of cutting the personal income tax and the capital gains cut is to send an unmistakable message to business leaders.
I really like the idea of consumption tax, and most countries have a pretty serious consumption tax. It's called a value-added tax or a goods and services tax ... It's a sales tax. It doesn't tax labor, it doesn't tax savings or investment - it taxes consumption.
I think that Governor Romney operates on the capital gains tax, his investments, what he lives off of instead of doing it off of his income.
I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone - not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 - shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain.
The IRS issued guidance for virtual currencies on March 25, 2014 that stated virtual currencies, including Bitcoin, are to be treated as property for federal tax purposes. This requires capital gains on virtual currencies to be recorded and reported. The Bitcoin Foundation says this could lead to unrealistic reporting.
I don't want to get into the 'who's a hostage-taker' discussion here, but what is the estate tax? It's a double tax on death. Economists will tell you that it's really not a tax that soaks the rich, but it's a tax on capital that deprives business investment and therefore job creation.
The appreciation of capital assets is already taxed at an extremely favorable rate compared to labor. That's why the rich pay such a low effective tax rate no matter what their marginal tax bracket.
The present tax codes inhibit the mobility and formation of capital, add complexities and inequities which undermine the morale of the taxpayer, and make tax avoidance rather than market factors a prime consideration in too many economic decisions.
The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities or to find other lawful methods of avoiding the realization of taxable income. The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up; wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people.
Index funds are... tax friendly, allowing investors to defer the realization of capital gains or avoid them completely if the shares are later bequeathed. To the extent that the long-run uptrend in stock prices continues, switching from security to security involves realizing capital gains that are subject to tax. Taxes are a crucially important financial consideration because the earlier realization of capital gains will substantially reduce net returns.
No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised, whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax.
Why do we fully tax some kinds of income from capital, like interest and dividends; partially tax other kinds like capital gains; defer tax on other kinds, like IRAs; and impose no tax at all on still other types of capital income, like interest on municipal bonds? This simply is not rational. These distinctions don't have any inherent logic.
The biggest - one of the biggest barriers to driving economic growth is the capital gains tax rate. I propose taking it to zero.
I love to tell how I'm suffering because one percent we're paying 25 percent of the total. We're not paying 25 percent of the total taxes on individuals. We're paying maybe 25 percent of the income tax, but the payroll tax is over a third of the receipts of the federal government. And they don't take that from me on capital gains. They don't take that from me on dividends. They take from the woman who comes in and takes the wastebaskets out.
One of the tax systems in the US is for wage earners. The government takes money from them out of each paycheck - so it knows how much they make, and those workers can't cheat to any significant degree. But the other tax system is for capital. Those with capital get to tell the government what they want to tell. They may get audited, but if their tax returns are of any size the government doesn't have enough of the smart auditors to figure out what's really going on. And there are the rules that allow you to do things like take in money today and pay taxes on it thirty years from now.
I believe the tax on capital gains should be zero.
A lot of people out there working hard and finally building up to getting a pretty good income. Higher tax rates on them, you know, the income rates going up, the dividend rates are going up, the capital gains rates all going up before health care kicks in.
After Independence, there were periods of very high taxation. So you didn't create wealth, how will you distribute it? When was the first time capital gains tax was introduced? It was 1992 March. Till then, everything was taxed one way.
Democrats who see virtue in the estate tax are doing the equivalent of aborting future enterprises. They deprive businesses of oxygen with their support for capital gains taxes and disregard for contracts.
In real estate you can avoid ever having to pay a capital gains tax, decade after decade, century after century. When you sell a property and make a capital gain, you simply turn around and buy a new property. The gain is not taxed. It's called "preserving your capital investment" - which goes up and up in value with each transaction.
One basic myth is that rich people get wealthy by earning income. But that's not how most get rich. Most of the gains of the rich people since 1945 have been "capital gains".
Well, certainly the Democrats have been arguing to raise the capital gains tax on all Americans. Obama says he wants to do that. That would slow down economic growth. It's not necessarily helpful to the economy. Every time we've cut the capital gains tax, the economy has grown. Whenever we raise the capital gains tax, it's been damaged.
The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital from static to more dynamic situations, the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth of the economy.
If there is such a thing as saintly renunciation, it is renouncing small gains for better gains; not for no gains, but seeing with open eyes what is better and what is inferior. Even if the choice has to lie between two momentary gains, one of these would always be found to be more real and lasting; that is the one that should be followed for the time.
I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.
What the issue here is, you get rid of all the conservative orthodoxy about capital gains, marginal tax rate, supply side economics, you just throw all that out the window, limited government and you just embrace the sheer and raw politics of resentment that have been bubbling the whole time and that`s what you get. You get Donald Trump.
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