{"id":6356,"date":"2011-11-22T00:01:08","date_gmt":"2011-11-22T08:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/22\/why-republicans-hate-the-capital-gains-tax\/"},"modified":"2011-11-22T00:01:08","modified_gmt":"2011-11-22T08:01:08","slug":"why-republicans-hate-the-capital-gains-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/22\/why-republicans-hate-the-capital-gains-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Republicans Hate the Capital Gains Tax"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might think that Republicans would love the capital gains tax, because it provides a way in which the super rich can pay taxes at a substantially reduced rate, 15% as opposed to 35%, on a substantial part of their income.  If you did, you would be wrong.  In the Republican view, 15% is too high a burden on the multi-millionaires and billionaires they represent.<\/font><\/p>\n

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\"22Greed\"The preferable treatment that investment income receives in the tax code is one of the factors driving the income inequality<\/a><\/font> and galvanizing the Occupy Wall Street movement. Because the capital gains tax is capped at 15 percent, \u201canyone making more than $34,500 a year in wages and salary is taxed at a higher rate<\/a><\/font> than a billionaire is taxed on untold millions in capital gains.\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n

The reason this low rate helps create an income divide is that capital gains are made almost exclusively by the wealthy. In fact, \u201cover the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people<\/a><\/font>.\u201d And the concentration is actually far greater than that, as half of all capital gains are made by the richest 0.1 percent of Americans<\/a><\/font>:<\/font><\/p>\n

Income and wealth disparities become even more absurd if we look at the top 0.1% of the nation\u2019s earners\u2013 rather than the more common 1%. <\/font>The top 0.1%\u2013 about 315,000 individuals out of 315 million\u2013 are making about half of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after 1 year; and these capital gains make up 60% of the income made by the Forbes 400.<\/strong><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s crystal clear that the Bush tax reduction on capital gains and dividend income in 2003 was the cutting edge policy that has created the immense increase in net worth of corporate executives, Wall St. professionals and other entrepreneurs.<\/font><\/p>\n

This is why the various Republican plans floated to reduce or eliminate<\/a><\/font> the capital gains tax<\/a><\/font> are folly\u2026 [emphasis original<\/em><\/span>]<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Think Progress<\/a>><\/p>\n

Note that we\u2019re not even talking about the top 1% here.  This is the top 1\/10 of 1%.  Essentially, all these flat tax plans Republicans are backing have one purpose:  to allow the 315,000 richest Americans to pay no tax on 60% of their income.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might think that Republicans would love the capital gains tax, because it provides a way in which the super rich can pay taxes at a substantially reduced rate, 15% as opposed to 35%, on a substantial part of their income.  If you did, you would be wrong.  In the Republican view, 15% is too […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}