The "in a good year" qualifier in both your comment and the parent comment means that your conclusion that this person has left the "working class" is untrue. It's not uncommon to get a windfall (stock option vesting cliff, inheritance, capital gains, etc.) that boosts income in a single year to many multiples of one's typical income. Such an occurrence does not boost the recipient out of the working class. Managed carefully, it can change their life (buy a house, turbo-charge retirement savings, etc.) but no one's buying a private island with a single year of $500k income.
It's helpful in this little side discussion because policies that might affect people with (as GP says) any ability to make six figures in a year are pretty different than those that affect people without. The "works for a living" distinction isn't super relevant.
This is a meaningless distinction because there was a time where mechanics and factory workers also made 6 figure salaries. The divide should always be between someone who makes most of their money from labor rather than capital. Actors and basketball players are not people that I think should necessarily be more impacted by a wealth tax.
I don't disagree that there are also huge differences between people making income from wages vs. capital, but that's beside the point.
Your comment about actors and basketball players confuses me a little. I think those are textbook high wage earners, not people who primarily live on capital (at least until they retire anyway). And presumably yeah, once you cross $100m (which I would guess not that many actors/athletes really do), it seems reasonable for a wealth tax to kick in. Isn't wealth wealth? Why should we make carve outs for specific professions?
Estate taxes don't kick in for estates worth less than $11.58 million and most states make immediate family exempt from all inheritance taxes.
Or much of a savings account or 401k, for that matter.
The option to stop working for more than a few weeks or months takes you squarely out of the working class.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is that the parent comment to ours is attempting to advocate for taxing just the billionaires and not to tax the moderately wealthy so much. I think that’s a flawed argument, because the moderately wealthy don’t need help, and are perhaps even more wealthy than they realize.
robinhood.com would beg to differ. Anyone can invest in the stock market and get capital gains.
There's no magic threshhold of $500k.
In the US in 2021 (aka, right now) the magic threshold for capital gains is $445,850-$501,600 depending on filing status. So you're technically correct that $500k isn't a magic threshold, but it's certainly in the middle of it.
But more importantly, you're going down a technical rabbithole. The point of this comment chain is "what happens to people experiencing a one-time windfall capital gains of $500,000". The response was "what about RH investors". My point was they weren't making 500k, so it was irrelevant that they made income taxed as a capital gain. And I stand by that.
No, its not.
The transition point between the top (20%) and middle (15%; the bottom is zero) marginal rate of long-term capital gains rates are either exactly the top or bottom of that range for 3 of 4 tax filing statuses (you left off married filing separately, which is much lower than even the low end), but that’s not a “magic threshold” by any reasonable definition.
Its a threshold, but not one below which capital gains stops mattering, which was the significance falsesly ascribed to the “magic number".
If you had cited the bottom of the 15% bracket instead of the top as the magic number below which cap gains don’t matter, well, “magic” would still be overdramatic but you would at leaast have something of a point. But that’s close to an order of magnitude lower.
Sorry, but capital gains taxes start at $15,000.
Long-term capital gains less than $40,400 (or higher, depending on filing status) have a 0% rate.
There’s already an exemption for capital gains tax on the sale of primary homes. $500,000 for married couples, and you can remove the cost basis and cost of improvements from the equation.
In other words, almost nobody is taxed on the sale of their primary home.
A household that makes $500k on a good year is actually in the 1% statistically. They have left the working class long ago. They could work for about 7-10 years in their career and retire with an above-median salary (withdrawing following the 4% rule) in perpetuity. That is by definition not the working class: that family barely has to work in order to secure a lifetime of comfortable living if they don’t inflate their lifestyle.
In my view, your comment acts as an implication of support for regressive tax policy that hurts the actual working class. No, moderately wealthy people do not need help. No, we are not temporarily embarrassed millionaires held back from generational wealthy only by government tax policy – that’s a farce sold to us by the very billionaires that want to avoid being taxed. They want us to think that taxes hurt us more than they hurt them, which is mathematically not true.
They want us to think that “if only our taxes were cut, we could go back to affording a middle class lifestyle.” It’s not true.