> It's both a magic number and a threshold

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.

It's also irrelevant as I called out in my post. The question was "how do we tax average people making a windfall of 500k", not "let's talk exclusively long-term capital gains"