The Looming Threat of Higher Capital Gains Taxation

September 19, 2019 by Dan Mitchell  @ International Liberty

I wrote yesterday about the generic desire among leftists to punish investors, entrepreneurs, and other high-income taxpayers.

Today, let’s focus on one of the specific tax hikes they want. There is near-unanimity among Democratic presidential candidates for higher tax rates on capital gains.

Given the importance of savings and investment to economic growth, this is quite misguided.
The Tax Foundation summarizes many of the key issues in capital gains taxation.

…viewed in the context of the entire tax system, there is a tax bias against income like capital gains. This is because taxes on saving and investment, like the capital gains tax, represent an additional layer of tax on capital income after the corporate income tax and the individual income tax. Under a neutral tax system, each dollar of income would only be taxed once. …Capital gains face multiple layers of tax, and in addition, gains are not adjusted for inflation. This means that investors can be taxed on capital gains that accrue due to price-level increases rather than real gains. …there are repercussions across the entire economy. Capital gains taxes can be especially harmful for entrepreneurs, and because they reduce the return to saving, they encourage immediate consumption over saving.

Here’s a chart depicting how this double taxation creates a bias against business investment.

Here are some excerpts from a column in the Wall Street Journal on the topic of capital gains taxation.

The authors focus on Laffer-Curve effects and argue that higher tax rates can backfire. I’m sympathetic to that argument, but I’m far more concerned about the negative impact of higher rates on economic performance and competitiveness.

…there is a relatively simple and painless way to maintain the federal coffers: Restore long-term capital-gains tax rates to the levels in place before President Obama took office. A reduction in this tax could generate significant additional revenue. …This particular levy is unique in that most of the time the taxpayer decides when to “realize” his capital gain and, consequently, when the government gets its revenue. If the capital-gains tax is too high, investors tend to hold on to assets to avoid being taxed. As a result, no revenue flows to the Treasury. If the tax is low enough, investors have an incentive to sell assets and realize capital gains. Both the investors and the government benefit. …The chance to test that theory came in May 2003, when Congress lowered the top rate on long-term capital gains to 15% from 20%. According to the Congressional Budget Office, by 2005-06 realizations of capital gains had more than doubled—up 151%—from the levels for 2002-03. Capital-gains tax receipts in 2005-06, at an average of $98 billion a year, were up 81% from 2002-03. Tax receipts reached a new peak of $127 billion in 2007 with the maximum rate still at 15%. By comparison, federal capital-gains tax receipts were a mere $7.9 billion in 1977 (the equivalent of about $31 billion in 2017 dollars), according to the Treasury Department. The effective maximum federal capital-gains tax was then 49%. …Using our post-2003 experience as a guide, we can predict a dramatic improvement in realizations and tax receipts if the top capital-gains tax rate is lowered to 15%. …but that’s not the only benefit. Such changes also increase the mobility of capital by inducing investors to realize gains. This allows investment money to flow more freely, particularly to new and young companies that are so important for growth and job creation.

Here’s another chart from the Tax Foundation showing that revenues are very sensitive to the tax rate.

Last but not least, Chris Edwards explains that the U.S. definitely over-taxes capital gains compared to other developed nations.

Democrats are proposing to raise capital gains taxes. …Almost every major Democratic presidential candidate supports taxing capital gains as ordinary income. …These are radical and misguided ideas. …capital gains taxes should be low or even zero. …the United States already has high tax rates compared to other countries. The U.S. federal-state rate on individual long-term gains of 28 percent compared at the time to an average across 34 OECD countries of just 16 percent. …the combined federal-state capital gains tax rates on investments in corporations…includes the corporate-level income tax and the tax on individual long-term gains. …Numerous countries in the OECD study do not tax individual long-term capital gains at all, including Belgium, Chile, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Hungary, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia, Switzerland, Turkey. The individual capital gains tax rate on long-term investments in those countries is zero. …Raising the federal corporate and individual capital gains tax rates would be a lose-lose-lose proposition of harming businesses and start-ups, undermining worker opportunities, and likely reducing government revenues.

Here’s his chart, showing the effective tax rate caused by double taxation.

As you can see, the 2017 tax reform was helpful, but we still need a much lower rate.

I’ll close by recycling my video on capital gains taxation.



You can also click here to learn about the unfairness of being taxed on gains that are solely due to inflation.

For what it’s worth, Senator Wyden wants to force investors to pay taxes on unrealized gains.