Say you have $100,000 dollars. You are approached with an opportunity to invest this sum into a bee farm. Being a shrewd investor you guess that there is a 50/50 chance that you will either double your investment, or lose the entire sum.
Say they raise the capital gains tax to 30%. If your investment succeeds you will recieve $70,000. If it fails you will lose $100,000. You decide the investment is not worth the risk. The bee farm is unable to hire a new bee keeper.
Now say they eliminate the capital gains tax. You proceed with the investment and a new bee keeper is hired. The farm thrives and you invest more into the farm and another bee keeper is hired.
Jesus Christ, why does this keep coming up? Let’s say you make $100,000. You pay $20,000 income tax on it. You have $80,000 left. You invest the $80,000. That $80,000 makes you another $30,000. Do you fucking honestly think the new $30,000 in income has already been taxed? The correct answer is NO. You pay tax on a total of $130,000 of income. Jesus.
Yes, you’re suggesting a “shrewd investor” will invest $100,000 in a business proposal that has an expected future value of $100,000. You also forgot that he can apply his $100,000 loss against future gains and reduce his future tax bill.
Either way, you make money, you pay your taxes, I don’t care if you make it investing or digging ditches. Investment isn’t worth the risk? Boo hoo, maybe you should find a decent investment to put your money in.
I was under the impression that money contributed to retirement accounts was done so before taxes are taken out.
Anyway you answered no to my question of whether retired people pay capital gains taxes. If they invested in property they don’t pay taxes on capital gains?
If I invest $100,000 to get a college degree, and by virtue of that degree, get a job for $80,000 a year, can I claim double taxation too? My income is a direct result of investing in a college education, so taxing the proceeds of that investment is double taxation on my original investment, which was already taxed when it was earned; have I got that right?
Except I wasn’t responding to your post but the OP. Actually the title of the thread
and the idea that paying the least amount of taxes that are legally required denotes immorality. That is why I added the “because it’s the right thing to do.”
Money is put into most retirement accounts before tax is taken out, and then when withdrawn, it is all taxed as income, even the portion that is a capital gain. Roths are an exception as the money going in is after tax and then not taxed at all on withdrawal.
Retirees do pay cgt if their AGI puts them in the 25% bracket or higher (this is the same for everyone, not just retired people).
Yea, but the OP specifically said he wasn’t making the argument that you accuse him of making. Indeed, three of the five sentences that made up the OP were stressing this point.
The weird knee-jerk to construct a strawman out of the argument the OP is explicitly not making by a sizable chunk of the posters in this thread is borderline Pavlovian.
The theory is that 99% feed on the scraps from the table of the 1% so if you want the 99% to eat better you give the 1% more food.
cite?
I’m pretty sure that this recession would make a balanced budget almost impossible no matter how much you taxed (within reason) or how much spending you cut. However if you reverse the effects of the recession then yeah, going back to Clinton era tax rates would get us back to Clinton era surpluses.
The argument for a long time hasn’t been that the rich will stop working. The argument has been that capital would leave. Rich people would take their ball and go home. The vast majority of American productivity isn’t because Americans work so much harder than everyone else (they do), its because our labor enjoys enormous leverage due to 70 years of capital infrastructure. Now the new capital dollars are not being as heavily invested in the USA as they used to be so we are losing produictivity to developing countries but we are starting to reach a tipping point where people are moving their investment back (oddly enough high fuel costs are helping us a bit here and the fact that the domestic Chinese and Indian consumer markets are not developing the way a lot of people thought they would.
Well as long as the powerless are free to accept or reject the terms being offered by the powerful then liberty has been preserved.
I’ve seen quite a bit of distaste from the conservatives on thsi baord for where we have found ourselves taxwise. These conservatives are frequently more interested in shrinking government than their tax bill. Unfortunately the conservatives that vote in elections are overwhelmingly more concerned about their tax bill.
I don’t know that much about carried interest but it always seemed a bit fishy to me. A lot of people did it and the wall street rule took effect (wall street rule is shorthand for: if everybody is doing it (especially if everyone means wall street), then it must be right, bureaucrats simply don’t have the power or the will to go after bad interpretations of laws that are widely held by wall streeters).
No that is a specifically intended tax benefit. The carried interest treatment is not.
Well those seniors, students and secretaries can go get their own superPAC.
In what way would we force him to give money to LDS? Charity is not a proxy for taxation.
It practically IS the Buffett rule. It would never happen tho.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought part of the stink raised about Romney’s tax rate was because of some funny (but legal) accounting on Bain Capital’s part. From what I’d heard, Bain didn’t pay Romney directly, but rather paid into an interest-yielding trust from which Romney benefited. If they’d paid Romney directly, Romney would have had to pay the same tax rate as everyone else, but because he received the money from the interest-yielding trust, he only had to pay capital gains taxes. Is that right, or did I misread what was going on?
You get to both collect interest on the money that would’ve gone to pay taxes and since most people are in a lower tax bracket after retirement, they get to pay tax on the income at a lower rate.
You get a thank-you to the appropriate level of taxes you pay. Mind you, this thank-you and admiration that I’m advocating is just for the realm of “Did you pay your fair share?” It doesn’t mean I’m suggesting that the rich should be able to cut in front of me at the roller coaster.
The hell they aren’t.
Luck is the derivative of planning. Y’know, the more I study and play chess, the more I find that ending up in a fortuitous position isn’t something that players stumble into. It’s something they’ve planned before it even became obvious how it would specifically come about. The same goes for life. There is very little luck in life in the long run, genetics aside.
But anyway, your question about paying it back is a question of dollars, not percentages. There’s no reason the “You earned that off of our infrastructure” should apply to the cents-per-dollar argument of taxation.