That is not the long-term capital gains rate in the US.
That flat tax rate certainly scales nicely the wealthier you happen to be, paying a max of 20% if you hold for more than a year and decide to cash in on this now several year massive run up in the markets.
If I invest my paycheck in the market, that money was already taxed at 30-40%. Now I make a dollar in the stock market , and it's taxed again at 20%.
This get ridiculous fast.
Then you would in effect discourage investing. Investing, which creates jobs and promotes innovation. Is as simple as that.
Consider the opposite extreme, where the government subsidizes investments to 100x what they are actually worth. Would this create more jobs and innovation, or merely "bullshit investments"?
If a subsidy wouldn't create jobs and innovation, a tax wouldn't take them away.
There is also the likely possibility that the same investments would be made, but valued lower.
Any economics text book.
>> Decreasing them all the way to negative ten thousand percent would increase investments a lot.
A physicist would say you have just invented perpetuum mobile.
>> Is that a good thing?
Does it matter if what you suggest is impossible?
If I buy shares of, say, APPL today, Apple Inc. doesn't actually get that money. The person who owned those shares before does. Even if I bought up $2B worth of shares, Apple would see none of that money. It is not actually invested in the company in any way.
If you want to encourage investing, then you need to find a way to advantage shares being sold directly by the company. (And, frankly, strongly discourage stock buybacks, because that's literally the opposite of investing, and generally only benefits the wealthiest shareholders.)
If your only contribution to a company is that you've funded it, I really don't think you should enjoy the same tax benefits as an entrepreneur who put their blood and sweat into it.
Let's define it like this - if working for a company is your primary occupation, you can enjoy the lower capital gains tax from its success. This includes founders and employees with equity. For everyone else it's income tax, because they've done little else than speculate, and, well, gambling wins count as personal income.
It's crazy that if I have a $5k loss in year one, I can't completely offset it in year 2 if I have a 5k gain. Now I can only use 3k going forward forever.
Wait did they change the carry forward rules?
At least the way it used to work was:
* Year 1 - 50k loss, 3k offset of ordinary income 47k carry forward
* Year 2 - 60k gain, 47k zeroed out from last year's carry forward, 13k is taxed
Is that not still the case?
I wouldn't confine wealth to just the billionaire class; I'd say wealth is anyone with 5 million+ USD in liquid assets (specifically, that sum of money in stocks, bonds and cash).
The poorest of the poor in the United States (that have to pay tax), make around $12K per year, and pay more in tax, percentage-wise, for their work than an individual doing absolutely nothing but passively investing in the market does (10% long-term capital gains).
There's zero political will to change this because, surprise, every senator, and most members of congress, would be shooting themselves in the foot if legislation to increase captial gains tax were passed.
There's too much focus on billionaries -- the United States population as a whole consists of many, many individuals with absurd amounts of wealth that pay next to nothing for doing nothing.
At any rate, it is what it is, the American corporate wealth machine benefits, largely, the already wealthy.