Capital Gains Tax Quotes

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

And of course there are all sorts of tax advantages. It’s a bonded warehouse. No VAT. And no capital gains tax either because you’re talking about a wasting chattel.

automatically compound. If you need cash, you can sell stock and pay capital gains tax at a lower rate than a dividend would be taxed.

We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

The [carried-interest] loophole was in essence an accounting trick that enabled hedge fund and private equity managers to categorize huge portions of their income as ‘interest,’ which was taxed at the 15 percent rate then applied to long-term capital gains. This was less than half the income tax rate paid by other top-bracket wage earners. Critics called the loophole a gigantic subsidy to millionaires and billionaires at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, estimated that the hedge fund loophole cost the government over $6 billion a year—the cost of providing health care to three million children. Of that total, it said, almost $2 billion a year from the tax break went to just twenty-five individuals.

Who wouldn’t want to claim an identity that allows them to pay zero taxes on capital gains, interests, or dividends? Puerto Rico represents a chance to live the American dream as it was intended: the freedom to reach our full potential without having to support a welfare state.

It turns out that addressing the most urgent problems of our time is, well, hard. But what is maddening about this debate is not how difficult fair-tax implementation would be but how utterly easy it is to find enough money to defeat poverty by closing nonsensical tax loopholes. If you don’t like the changes I suggested above, I can propose twenty smaller reforms, or fifty tinier ones, or a hundred even more innocuous nudges to get us there. We could raise $25 billion by winding down the mortgage interest deduction, which disproportionately benefits high-income families and does nothing to promote homeownership. We could find $64.7 billion by increasing the maximum taxable amount of earnings for Social Security so that high- and low-income workers are taxed at the same rate. We could scratch out another $37.3 billion if we treated capital gains and dividends for wealthy Americans the same way we treat income for tax purposes.

The long-standing arguments on whether to, or not to, enforce a crypto taxation laws or capital gains tax on cryptocurrency trading and transactions is glaringly coming to an end. It is believed that in order to legalize cryptocurrency as a legal tender, there would be need for documented cryptocurrency taxation by the government.

Many conservatives have succumbed to the heresy of Economism, a mirror-Marxism that holds that man is an economic animal, that free trade and free markets are the path to peace, prosperity, and happiness, that if we can only get the marginal tax rates right and the capital gains tax abolished, Paradise—Dow 36,000!—is at hand. But when the income tax rate for the wealthiest was above 90 percent in the 1950s, America, by every moral and social indicator, was a better country.

As of today, the majority of Asian countries are still examining crypto technology and drafting their regulatory outlines. Better crypto tax regulations should come in the next few months or a year from now. Now, we can settle the argument on crypto taxation laws enforcement. It is very certain that it is just a matter of time for this event to unfold, collecting capital gains tax is just a time bomb waiting to explode in the cryptocurrency space, or else, the government will place outright ban on these commodities.

finance was to become a public utility, situated in the public domain or at least alongside a public banking option. Instead, the past century’s expansion of predatory credit has been reinforced by de-taxing interest, land rent, financial speculation, debt leveraging and “capital” (asset-price) gains.

For example, “1031” is jargon for Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate. Real estate is one investment vehicle that allows such a great tax advantage.

From World War II until 1981 the top marginal income tax rate never fell below 70 percent. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican whom no one ever accused of being a socialist, the top rate was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, Americans with incomes of over $1 million (in today’s dollars) paid a top marginal rate, on average, of 52 percent. As recently as the late 1980s, the top tax rate on capital gains was 35 percent. But as income and wealth have accumulated at the top, so has the political power to reduce taxes. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which were extended for two years in December 2010, capped top rates at 35 percent, their lowest level in more than half a century, and reduced capital gains taxes to 15 percent.

You know that one scene that shows up at the end of every heist movie, where the crooks recline on the beach with Mai Tais in hand, the ocean lapping peacefully in the background, both flashing that incredulous grin, astonished that they managed to pull off their audacious scheme? Those were our friends the capitalists, back in the summer of 1981, when the Republicans under President Ronald Reagan proposed massive cuts in the tax rates for unearned income, capital gains, and income tax rates even for the rich—and the Democrats responded by pushing for even more massive cuts. In

While we might expect to see venture capital develop further in an increasingly intangible economy, it is not clear that governments can or should do much more to promote it than they already do. As Josh Lerner showed in The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2012), once tax breaks or subsidies for venture capital get beyond a certain level, they tend to encourage dumb investments (since the tax gain on its own is enough for the investors to profit); since the entire point of venture capital is smart investment, very large tax breaks are self-defeating. For a country to grow its venture capital sector, time and favorable framework conditions are more important than additional subsidies.

Ultimately, the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world, is the largest historical database available concerning the evolution of income inequality; it is the primary source of data for this book.24 The book’s second most important source of data, on which I will actually draw first, concerns wealth, including both the distribution of wealth and its relation to income. Wealth also generates income and is therefore important on the income study side of things as well. Indeed, income consists of two components: income from labor (wages, salaries, bonuses, earnings from nonwage labor, and other remuneration statutorily classified as labor related) and income from capital (rent, dividends, interest, profits, capital gains, royalties, and other income derived from the mere fact of owning capital in the form of land, real estate, financial instruments, industrial equipment, etc., again regardless of its precise legal classification). The WTID contains a great deal of information about the evolution of income from capital over the course of the twentieth century. It is nevertheless essential to complete this information by looking at sources directly concerned with wealth. Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.25 In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.26 This

While he wanted a job with the Trump administration, the Mooch specifically wanted one of the jobs that would give him a tax break on the sale of his business. A federal program provides for deferred payment of capital gains in the event of a sale of property to meet ethical requirements. Scaramucci needed a job that would get him a “certificate of divestiture,” which is what an envious Scaramucci knew Gary Cohn had received for the sale of his Goldman stock.

The most striking thing about this economic story is the degree to which American politicians conspired to accelerate, rather than to slow, the divide between the fates of the super-rich and those of ordinary citizens. Ronald Reagan slashed the top tax rate for high-income earners from 70 percent to 50 percent in 1981, and then again to 38.5 percent in 1986. George W. Bush cut the top income rate to 35 percent and the capital gains rate— which is almost exclusively paid by the wealthy—from 20 percent to 15 percent in 2003.

Specifically, they argue that digital technology drives inequality in three different ways. First, by replacing old jobs with ones requiring more skills, technology has rewarded the educated: since the mid-1970s, salaries rose about 25% for those with graduate degrees while the average high school dropout took a 30% pay cut.45 Second, they claim that since the year 2000, an ever-larger share of corporate income has gone to those who own the companies as opposed to those who work there—and that as long as automation continues, we should expect those who own the machines to take a growing fraction of the pie. This edge of capital over labor may be particularly important for the growing digital economy, which tech visionary Nicholas Negroponte defines as moving bits, not atoms. Now that everything from books to movies and tax preparation tools has gone digital, additional copies can be sold worldwide at essentially zero cost, without hiring additional employees. This allows most of the revenue to go to investors rather than workers, and helps explain why, even though the combined revenues of Detroit’s “Big 3” (GM, Ford and Chrysler) in 1990 were almost identical to those of Silicon Valley’s “Big 3” (Google, Apple, Facebook) in 2014, the latter had nine times fewer employees and were worth thirty times more on the stock market.47 Figure 3.5: How the economy has grown average income over the past century, and what fraction of this income has gone to different groups. Before the 1970s, rich and poor are seen to all be getting better off in lockstep, after which most of the gains have gone to the top 1% while the bottom 90% have on average gained close to nothing.46 The amounts have been inflation-corrected to year-2017 dollars. Third, Erik and collaborators argue that the digital economy often benefits superstars over everyone else.

If your current securities are in a taxable account, and if they’re profitable, you need to consider any resulting taxes and fees before selling existing securities. This is a common problem and is the reason it is so important for investors to use tax-efficient funds when investing in taxable accounts. Here are five steps to minimize taxes: Stop making contributions into unwanted and tax-inefficient securities. Stop reinvesting distributions. Determine the amount of gain or loss in each taxable security. If any security has a loss, consider selling and taking the tax-loss benefit. If any security has a profit, consider selling up to the amount of your losses (after being held for one year to benefit from the lower capital gains tax rate). Numbers 4 and 5 will be a wash and will result in zero tax. Put the proceeds from your sales into the appropriate tax-efficient total market index fund(s).

We have the money. We've just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians' canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

called for the repeal of all campaign-finance laws and the abolition of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It also favored the abolition of all government health-care programs, including Medicaid and Medicare. It attacked Social Security as “virtually bankrupt” and called for its abolition, too. The Libertarians also opposed all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, and called for an end to the prosecution of tax evaders. Their platform called for the abolition too of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, among other government agencies.

More importantly, in most countries there were also many policies that ended up redistributing income from the poor to the rich. There have been tax cuts for the rich – top income-tax rates were brought down. Financial deregulation has created huge opportunities for speculative gains as well as astronomical paycheques for top managers and financiers (see Things 2 and 22). Deregulation in other areas has also allowed companies to make bigger profits, not least because they were more able to exploit their monopoly powers, more freely pollute the environment and more readily sack workers. Increased trade liberalization and increased foreign investment – or at least the threat of them – have also put downward pressure on wages. As a result, income inequality has increased in most rich countries. For example, according to the ILO (International Labour Organization) report The World of Work 2008, of the twenty advanced economies for which data was available, between 1990 and 2000 income inequality rose in sixteen countries, with only Switzerland among the remaining four experiencing a significant fall.1 During this period, income inequality in the US, already by far the highest in the rich world, rose to a level comparable to that of some Latin American countries such as Uruguay and Venezuela.

MY RECOMMENDATION Below is my advice about regarding selling SpaceX stock or options. No complicated analysis is required, as the rules of thumb are pretty simple. If you believe that SpaceX will execute better than the average public company, then our stock price will continue to appreciate at a rate greater than that of the stock market, which would be the next highest return place to invest money over the long term. Therefore, you should sell only the amount that you need to improve your standard of living in the short to medium term. I do actually recommend selling some amount of stock, even if you are certain it will appreciate, as life is short and a bit more cash can increase fun and reduce stress at home (so long as you don’t ratchet up your ongoing personal expenditures proportionately). To maximize your post tax return, you are probably best off exercising your options to convert them to stock (if you can afford to do this) and then holding the stock for a year before selling it at our roughly biannual liquidity events. This allows you to pay the capital gains tax rate, instead of the income tax rate.

Once in public office, Mellon helped define the 1920s as an era during which business succeeded in rolling back many of the Progressive Era’s reforms. In 1921, capital gains taxes were cut, and the stock market boomed. After repeated efforts during his dozen-year tenure at Treasury, in 1926 Mellon finally succeeded in getting a bill passed that “cut the tax rates on the richest Americans more deeply than any other tax law in history,” according to Martin. Mellon promised greater growth and prosperity. When instead the stock market crashed in 1929 after a frenzy of speculation, his legacy was tarnished. Not only did his economic theories look self-serving and irresponsible, but it surfaced that Mellon himself had been secretly providing tax credits and subsidies to some of the country’s biggest businesses, including many in which the Mellon family had major investments.

Now there is an attempt to reverse the history, to go back to the happy days when the principles of economic rationalism briefly reigned, gravely demonstrating that people have no rights beyond what they can gain in the labor market. And since now the injunction to "go somewhere else" won't work, the choices are narrowed to the workhouse prison or starvation, as a matter of natural law, which reveals that any attempt to help the poor only harms them—the poor, that is; the rich are miraculously helped thereby, as when state power intervenes to bail our investors after the collapse of the highly-toured Mexican "economic miracle," or to save failing banks and industries, or to bar Japan from American markets to allow domestic corporations to reconstruct the steel, automotive, and electronics industry in the 1980s (amidst impressive rhetoric about free markets by the most protectionist administration in the postwar era and its acolytes). And far more; this is the merest icing on the cake. But the rest are subject to the iron principles of economic rationalism, now sometimes called "tough love" by those who allocate the benefits.

Any gain on sale of a capital asset i.e. investment, is considered as a capital gain. The taxation of capital gains varies widely depending upon the type of capital asset, whether short term or long term and whether the Securities Transaction Tax (STT) has been paid.

Mr. Bharat Shah sold shares of MBK Private Limited for Rs. 1,500,000 on July 1, 2014. The shares were acquired for Rs. 1,000,000 on January 1, 2013. STT is not required to be paid on the sale of shares of a private limited company. As shares are unlisted, sale is made before July 10 and period of holding is more than 12 months, the capital gain would be considered as a LTCG. The indexed cost of acquiring shares would be Rs.1,201,878 (1,000,000*1027/852) and LTCG would be Rs. 298,122. Mr. Bharat would pay income tax @ 20% of Rs. 59,624.

Mr. Kunal from Uganda invested Rs. 3,000,000 in gold in February 2010. If he sold the gold for 4,000,000 in January 2013, the capital gain would be a STCG as he sold it within 36 months. The STCG of Rs. 1,000,000 will be added to the other income and taxed as a regular income based on the income tax slab.

To compensate for the gain due to inflation, CII was introduced. It means there is no capital gain if the asset has returned only to meet the inflation (CII). Any gain over and above the inflation is the real gain and tax is to be levied on only the real gain.

Mr. Ankur from USA invested in an equity mutual fund that is an overseas fund of funds. He sold the fund after 10 months of investment for a profit of Rs. 1,000,000 without paying STT. As equity mutual fund was sold before 12 months, the capital gain would be a STCG. However as STT was not paid, STCG would be included in the income and taxed as per the income tax slab rates.

Mr. Al Gul from Indonesia sold a residential property for 30,000,000 resulting in a LTGC after indexation of 10,000,000. He invested Rs. 5,000,000 in NHAI capital gain tax bonds and invested 5,000,000 in a residential property. He will be allowed to claim both exemptions – NHAI bonds and residential property. Thus, he would not pay any tax on Rs.10,000,000.

Mr. Gopal sold shares of NJPA Private Limited for Rs. 1,500,000 on August 1, 2014 without paying STT. The shares were acquired for Rs. 1,000,000 on January 1, 2013. As shares are unlisted, sale is made after July 10, 2014 and period of holding is less than 36 months, the capital gain would be considered as STCG. The capital gain of Rs. 500,000 would be added to Mr. Gopal’s income and he would have to pay income tax as per his tax slab rates.

Mr. Taral from Brazil sold shares of ABC Company, an unlisted public company without paying STT. The shares were purchased for Rs. 2,000,000 in January 2011 and were sold in October 2014 for Rs. 3,000,000. As shares are unlisted, sale was made after July 10, 2014 and period of holding is more than 36 months, the capital gain would be considered as LTCG. Mr. Taral would pay tax @ 20% of gain after indexation. The indexed cost would be Rs. 28,80,450 (2,000,000*1024/711) resulting in a LTCG of Rs. 119,550 and tax @ 20% on indexed gain would be 23,910.

Ms. Hetal owned shares of Infosys in physical form. She had acquired the shares in February 1997 for Rs. 100,000. She sold the shares outside stock exchange without paying STT to her friend Ms. Dhwani for Rs. 10,000,000 in May 2014. As listed shares were sold after 12 months, the capital gain is a LTCG. However, as STT was not paid, the LTCG would be taxed at a lower of 20% after indexation of Rs. 9,664,242 (10,000,000-335738(100,000*1027/305) i.e. Rs. 1,932,852 or 10% of gain without indexation of Rs. 9,900,000 i.e. Rs. 990,000. Ms. Hetal would pay tax of Rs. 990,000.

Once in public office, Mellon helped define the 1920s as an era during which business succeeded in rolling back many of the Progressive Era’s reforms. In 1921, capital gains taxes were cut, and the stock market boomed. After repeated efforts during his dozen-year tenure at Treasury, in 1926 Mellon finally succeeded in getting a bill passed that “cut the tax rates on the richest Americans more deeply than any other tax law in history,

My capital gains of approximately $40,000 were placed into a 1031 tax-deferred exchange,

Yes, Pilcher was a money-man. They were a type. It was easy to spot them. You could always tell one by that cold fire in his eyes. It was not the hot fire of the man who would never interrupt a dream to calculate the risk, but the cold fire of the man whose mind was geared to the rules of the money game. It was a game that was played with numbers on pieces of paper … common into preferred, preferred into debentures, debentures into dollars, dollars into long-term capital gains. It was the net dollars after tax that were important. They were the numbers on the scoreboard, the runs that crossed the plate, the touchdowns, the goals. Net dollars were the score markers of the money-man’s game. Nothing else mattered. A factory wasn’t a living, breathing organism. It was only a dollar sign and a row of numbers after the Plant & Equipment item on the balance sheet. Their guts didn’t tighten when they heard a big Number Nine bandsaw sink its whining teeth into hard maple. Their nostrils didn’t widen to the rich musk of walnut or the sharply pungent blast from the finishing room. When they saw a production line they looked with blind eyes, not feeling the counterpoint beat of their hearts or the pulsing flow of hot blood or the trigger-set tenseness of lungs that were poised to miss a breath with every lost beat on the line

The argument for a lower tax rate on capital income—an argument supported by many economists—runs as follows: (1) economies need capital investment to grow and create new jobs; (2) capital investment by definition is risky (you could lose it all); and (3) therefore, a lower rate of tax on potential gains is necessary to encourage people to make those essential, but risky, investments.

broker or banker who invests other people’s money can count his own salary as “capital gains” and thus pay tax on it at the reduced, capital gains rate.

Ingvar Kamprad started IKEA. He owns most of IKEA through INGKA Holding and Stitching INGKA Foundation. He took his share of IKEA, put it in a trust, and the trust pays no taxes, so he basically pays no taxes. Rich people do this all the time. They either move to a country where there is no tax on worldwide income, or no capital gains tax. The concept that you’ll always pay tax is a little overblown if you are a member of the capital class.

Tax policies written by Davos Man for his own benefit had enhanced the divide. A pair of University of California at Berkeley economists2, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, tallied up all the taxes that Americans paid, from federal, state, and local income taxes to sales taxes and capital gains on investments. They had concluded that the richest four hundred Americans, whose average wealth was $6.7 billion, had seen their effective tax rate cut by more than half since 1962—from 54 percent to 23 percent. Over the same period, those in the bottom half, who earned about $18,500 a year, had seen their tax burden increase, from 22.5 percent to 24 percent.

It took Valentine a year and a half to raise $5 million for his first fund.[18] But in the end he succeeded by tapping pools of capital that enjoyed charitable status: the universities and endowments that escaped not only regulation but also capital-gains tax. The Ford Foundation came in first, later to be joined by Yale, Vanderbilt, and eventually Harvard; ironically, the Ivy League investment bosses showed a greater open-mindedness about a gruff Fordham graduate than many alumni could muster. In so doing, the endowments set in motion one of the great virtuous cycles of the American system. Venture capitalists backed knowledge-intensive startups, and some of the profits flowed to research institutions that generated more knowledge.[19

In 1988, NDTV got a good contract from Doordarshan to produce a famous weekly show called The World This Week, which was anchored by the owner Prannoy Roy. As per records, Doordarshan granted Rs.2 lakhs ($6000[1]) per episode to NDTV, which was a princely sum in those days. Incidentally the head of Doordarshan at that time was Bhaskar Ghose and his son-in-law journalist Rajdeep Sardesai became the No. 2 in NDTV. The Congress Party was in power then and showed all possible support to NDTV and provided a red-carpet welcome to the private media unit to enjoy the national resources of Doordarshan. Every resource and infrastructure of Doordarshan was used for NDTV’s growth. In fact, in the early days (1995-1997), it is this tax payer money (Doordarshan contract) that got him personal gains again when he did “sweet” private equity deals (for sale of personal stake belonging to him and his wife) to a few global private equity funds. Thus, he built a business from patronage (government money) and then created value and cashed some of it by selling to private equity investors such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital, Jardine Fleming etc.

If you purchased a building for $200,000 but were eligible to depreciate $5,000 of its value, you would effectively pay just $195,000. If you take depreciation deductions and then sell the property, the $5,000 will be used to pay back those costs. A 25% tax is applied to the recouped funds. If the building were sold for $210,000, the net gain would be $15,000. However, $5,000 of that total would be considered recoupment of the tax break. A maximum of 25% of the amount reclaimed is taxed as regular income. The remaining $10,000 in capital gain would be taxed at the zero, fifteen, or 20% rates described above.

A 2008 study of the wealthiest four hundred taxpayers, for instance, showed that they earned an average of $202 million and paid an effective income tax rate of less than 20 percent. Fully 60 percent of their declared income derived from capital gains. In other words, the effective tax rate on earning $202 million was lower than the rate paid by Americans earning $34,501 a year.

When asked if he would raise the capital gains tax even if it meant decreasing revenue, candidate Obama said, “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” “Fairness” simply means “what I approve of,” a subjective term that seems objective but has no actual inherent meaning.

Investors can benefit from tax exemption on capital gain Bonds under Section 54EC of the Income Tax Act 1961 by investing in 54EC capital gain bonds. So invest now with RR Finance.

Most’s eclectic background also provided the spark behind the invention of what would become known as the ETF. During his travels around the Pacific, he had appreciated the efficiency of how traders would buy and sell warehouse receipts of commodities, rather than the more cumbersome physical vats of coconut oil, barrels of crude, or ingots of gold. This opened up a panoply of opportunities for creative financial engineers. “You store a commodity and you get a warehouse receipt and you can finance on that warehouse receipt. You can sell it, do a lot of things with it. Because you don’t want to be moving the merchandise back and forth all the time, so you keep it in place and you simply transfer the warehouse receipt,” he later recalled.19 Most’s ingenious idea was to, after a fashion, mimic this basic structure. The Amex could create a kind of legal warehouse where it could place the S&P 500 stocks, and then create and list shares in the warehouse itself for people to trade. The new warehouse-cum-fund would take advantage of the growth and electronic evolution in portfolio trading—the simultaneous buying and selling of big baskets of stocks first pioneered by Wells Fargo two decades earlier—and a little-known aspect of mutual funds: They can do “in kind” transactions, exchanging shares in a fund for a proportional amount of the stocks it contains, rather than cash. Or an investor can gather the correct proportion of the underlying stocks and exchange them for shares in the fund. Stock exchange “specialists”—the trading firms on the floor of the exchange that match buyers and sellers—would be authorized to be able to create or redeem these shares according to demand. They could take advantage of any differences that might open up between the price of the “warehouse” and the stock it contained, an arbitrage opportunity that should help keep it trading in line with its assets. This elegant creation/redemption process would also get around the logistical challenges of money coming in and out continuously throughout the day—one of Bogle’s main practical concerns. In basic terms, investors can either trade shares of the warehouse between themselves, or go to the warehouse and exchange their shares in it for a slice of the stocks it holds. Or they can turn up at the warehouse with a suitable bundle of stocks and exchange them for shares in the warehouse. Moreover, because no money changes hands when shares in the warehouse are created or redeemed, capital gains tax can be delayed until the investor actually sells their shares—a side effect that has proven vital to the growth of ETFs in the United States. Only when an ETF is actually sold will investors have to pay any capital gains taxes due.

If you fully convert your home to rental property and use it that way for years before selling it, after you do sell you can either take advantage of the lower long-term capital gains rates or do a tax deferred exchange. For tax purposes, you get to deduct depreciation and all of the write-offs during the ownership and you can shelter up to $25,000 in income from active sources subject to income eligibility requirements. (Please

Even in the domain of conventional currencies, this trend is in evidence. Today, 14 U.S. states, namely, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, have taken action to create their own state currency, usually backed by a precious metal such as gold or silver.24 In the case of Utah, for example, the Utah Legislature has passed a bill allowing gold and silver coins to be used as legal tender in the state—and for the value of their precious metal, not just the face value of the coins. Utah’s bill allows stores to accept gold and silver coins as legal tender. It also exempts gold and silver transactions from the state’s capital gains tax, though that does not shield exchanges from federal taxes.

First, a total-market index fund is an ideal “core” equity holding in a taxable account, because of its “tax efficiency.” The Russell 3000 and the Wilshire 5000 have essentially no turnover. Stocks may leave the index via mergers and acquisitions, but these are often not taxable events. The only way a stock truly leaves these portfolios is feet first, by going bankrupt, in which case you don’t have to worry about capital gains.

The five major sources of income which are exempt for NRIs are: Proceeds from Life Insurance Policy - provided the policy complies with the exemption criteria/conditions Dividend from a domestic company or mutual fund scheme - provided the company or mutual fund scheme has paid the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT), if applicable Interest on an NRE account – provided the NRE account is maintained as per the FEMA rules Interest on FCNR or RFC accounts – provided the account owner is a non-resident or RBNOR under the Income Tax Act Long Term Capital Gain on equity and equity based mutual fund – provided the Security Transaction Tax (STT) has been paid

On television one evening in the middle of the 1960s, David Suskind asked six assembled multi-millionaires whether any of them considered tax rates a stumbling block on the high road to wealth in America. There was a long silence, almost as if the notion were new to the multi-millionaires, and then one of them, in the tone of someone explaining something to a child, mentioned the capital gains provision and said that he didn't consider taxes much of a problem. There was no more discussion of high tax rates that night.

The resulting financial overhead consists of claims on the economy’s actual means of production. Yet most people think of these bonds, bank loans and stocks and creditor claims as wealth, not its antithesis on the debit side of the balance sheet. This inside-out doublethink is a precondition for the bubble economy to be applauded by the mass media, keeping its corrosive momentum expanding. From the corporate sphere and real estate to personal budgets, the distinguishing feature over the past half-century has been the rise in debt/equity and debt/income ratios. Just as debt leveraging has hiked corporate break-even costs of doing business, so the cost of living has been increased as homes and office buildings have been bid up on mortgage credit. “Creating wealth” in a debt-financed way makes economies high-cost, exacerbated by the tax shift onto labor and consumers instead of capital gains and “free lunch” rent. These financial and fiscal policies have enabled financial managers to siphon off the industrial profits that were expected to fund capital formation to increase productivity and living standards. The

In the end it’s the tax-deferred 1031 exchange that gets massive use by Millionaire Real Estate Investors. This program in the IRS tax code allows you to sell and buy properties without having to declare capital gains or pay those taxes. It’s a very straightforward procedure, but it takes some planning. First, you need to hire a 1031 Qualified Intermediary before you close on the sale of one of your properties. That person will act as your guide and escrow agent as you move through the sale of one property and the purchase of the next. After the sale of your “relinquished property” you have 45 days to identify the “replacement property” and a total of 180 days to close on that second property. You want to be looking for the replacement property before or during the marketing of the property you are selling. If you find a good opportunity, you can enter into a contract with a right to assign clause if your first property does not sell or with a 1031 clause in the purchase agreement if it does. Many people have the mistaken notion that you are exchanging your property with someone else: You take theirs, and they take yours. In some cases that can be done, but it is neither the purpose nor the requirement of a 1031 exchange. A 1031 exchange is designed for you to “exchange” one property in your portfolio (sell it) and replace it with another one that you wish to buy. It allows you to keep purchasing larger, more expensive properties without having to pay capital gains taxes on the ones you sell. This is a wonderful way to keep your money working for you.

Countries competing against one another in the same array of products and services is not covered by Ricardian trade theory.   Offshoring doesn’t fit the Ricardian or the competitive idea of free trade. In fact, offshoring is not trade.   Offshoring is the practice of a firm relocating its production of goods or services for its home market to a foreign country. When an American firm moves production offshore, US GDP declines by the amount of the offshored production, and foreign GDP increases by that amount. Employment and consumer income decline in the US and rise abroad. The US tax base shrinks, resulting in reductions in public services or in higher taxes or a switch from tax finance to bond finance and higher debt service cost.   When the offshored production comes back to the US to be marketed, the US trade deficit increases dollar for dollar. The trade deficit is financed by turning over to foreigners US assets and their future income streams. Profits, dividends, interest, capital gains, rents, and tolls from leased toll roads now flow from American pockets to foreign pockets, thus worsening the current account deficit as well.   Who benefits from these income losses suffered by Americans? Clearly, the beneficiary is the foreign country to which the production is moved. The other prominent beneficiaries are the shareholders and the executives of the companies that offshore production. The lower labor costs raise profits, the share price, and the “performance bonuses” of corporate management.   Offshoring’s proponents claim that the lost incomes from job losses are offset by benefits to consumers from lower prices. Allegedly, the harm done to those who lose their jobs is more than offset by the benefit consumers in general get from the alleged lower prices. Yet, proponents are unable to cite studies that support this claim. The claim is based on the unexamined assumption that offshoring is free trade and, thereby, mutually beneficial.   Proponents of jobs offshoring also claim that the Americans who are left unemployed soon find equal or better jobs. This claim is based on the assumption that the demand for labor ensures full employment, and that people whose jobs have been moved abroad can be retrained for new jobs that are equal to or better than the jobs that were lost.   This claim is false.

As income taxes and capital-gains taxes were reduced in the United States beginning in the 1980s, the share of federal taxes paid by “the rich” steadily went up. From 1980 to 2010, as the top 1 percent increased their share of before-tax income from 9 percent to 15 percent, their share of the individual income tax soared from 17 percent to 39 percent of the total paid. Their share of total federal taxes more than doubled during a period when the highest marginal tax rate was cut in half, from 70 percent to 35.5 percent. The wealthy, in short, are already paying more than their fair share of taxes, and the growth in their wealth and incomes has had nothing to do with tax avoidance or deflecting the tax burden to the middle class.

The 9/11 Commission warned that Al Qaeda "could... scheme to wield weapons of unprecedented destructive power in the largest cities of the United States." Future attacks could impose enormous costs on the entire economy. Having used up the surplus that the country enjoyed as part of the Cold War peace dividend, the U.S. government is in a weakened financial position to respond to another major terrorist attack, and its position will be damaged further by the large budget gaps and growing dependence on foreign capital projected for the future. As the historian Paul Kennedy wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, too many decisions made in Washington today "bring merely short-term advantage but long-term disadvantage." The absence of a sound, long-term financial strategy could bring about a deterioration that, in his words, "leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense." Decades of success in mobilizing enormous sums of money to fight large wars and meet other government needs have led Americans to believe that ample funds will be readily available in the event of a future war, terrorist attack, or other emergency. But that can no longer be assumed. Budget constraints could limit the availability or raise the cost of resources to deal with new emergencies. If government debt continues to pile up, deficits rise to stratospheric levels, and heave dependence on foreign capital grows, borrowing the money needed will be very costly. [Alexander] Hamilton understood the risks of such a precarious situation. After suffering through financial shortages, lack of adequate food and weapons, desertions, and collapsing morale during the Revolution, he considered the risk that the government would have difficulty in assembling funds to defend itself all too real. If America remains on its dangerous financial course, Hamilton's gift to the nation - the blessing of sound finances - will be squandered. The U.S. government had no higher obligation that to protect the security of its citizens. Doing so becomes increasingly difficult if its finances are unsound. While the nature of this new brand of warfare, the war on terrorism, remains uncharted, there is much to be gained if our leaders look to the experiences of the past for guidance in responding to the challenges of the future. The willingness of the American people and their leaders to ensure that the nation's finances remain sound in the face of these new challenges - sacrificing parochial interests for the common good - is the price we must pay to preserve the nation's security and thus the liberties that Hamilton and his generation bequeathed us.

The government can put dividends on the same tax basis as capital gains if the tax authorities allow investors to obtain a tax deferral on reinvested dividends until the stock is sold.

For any equity investment, long term capital gain (>12 months) is exempt from tax whereas short term gain is taxed at 15% flat. For

Investment made for more than 36 months is considered a long term capital gain and is taxed at 20% after applying for indexation, which is about 9% p.a. As a result, return of over 9% only is taxed @ 20%.

STP/SWP are considered as a sale and taxed as a short term or long term capital gain based on the period of holding determined

dividend option to reduce the effective tax as short term capital gain is taxed based on tax slab rates

Mr. Bhagwat, an NRI from France, bought a residential property in 2009-10 for Rs. 10,000,000 out of NRE account. If he sells the property in 2013-14 for Rs. 17,500,000, he is allowed to credit Rs. 10,000,000 to an NRE account up to a maximum of 2 properties. The gain amount of Rs. 7,500,000 will be credited to the NRO account and only after payment of the long term capital gain tax he may remit the funds abroad or transfer it to an NRE account.

Only long term capital gains on a MF which is subject to Security Transaction Tax (STT) are exempt from income tax. Any other

Any redemption would be considered and taxed as a capital gain. For

Psychologists also remind us that investors are far more distressed by losses than they are delighted by gains. This leads people to discard their winners if they need cash and hold onto their losers because they don’t want to recognize or admit that they made a mistake. Remember: Selling winners means paying capital gains taxes while selling losers can produce tax deductions. So if you need to sell, sell your losers. At least that way you get a tax deduction rather than an increase in your tax liability.

A major advantage of indexing is that index funds are tax efficient. Actively managed funds can create large tax liabilities if you hold them outside your tax-advantaged retirement plans. To the extent that your funds generate capital gains from their portfolio turnover, this active trading creates taxable income for you. And short-term capital gains are taxed at ordinary income tax rates that can go well over 50 percent when state income taxes are considered. Index funds, in contrast, are long-term buy-and-hold investors and typically do not generate significant capital gains or taxable income. To

Those cuts had lowered the top income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. With bipartisan support, Bush had also slashed taxes on unearned income, most of which went to the rich. Taxes on dividends, for instance, were reduced dramatically from 39.6 percent to 15 percent. Taxes on capital gains, the overwhelming bulk of which were reaped by the wealthy, fell from 20 percent to 15 percent. As a result, many of the richest Americans were taxed at lower rates than middle- and working-class wage earners. A

A 2008 study of the wealthiest four hundred taxpayers, for instance, showed that they earned an average of $202 million and paid an effective income tax rate of less than 20 percent. Fully 60 percent of their declared income derived from capital gains. In other words, the effective tax rate on earning $202 million was lower than the rate paid by Americans earning $34,501 a year. The

The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following: • We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs. • We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services. . . . • We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . . • We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes. • We support the eventual repeal of all taxation. • As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately. • We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . . • Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . . • We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . . • We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system. . . . • We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . . • We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44 The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office.

In his opinion (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) the most equitable system of taxation, and consequently the one best suited to a society of free men, would be a capitation tax in proportion to the amount of property which a man possesses over and above the necessities of life. Those who possess only the latter should pay nothing at all. As for the other citizens, the tax should be levied, not in simple ratio to the property of the taxed, but in compound ratio to the difference of their conditions and the superfluity of their possessions. It is perfectly just that the more wealthy a man is, the more he should pay in taxation. For one thing, the rich derive great advantages from the social contract. Society protects their possessions and opens to them easy access to lucrative positions of eminence and power. They enjoy many advantages which the poor fail to enjoy. Hence, as the richer a man is, the more he gets out of the State, so to speak, he should be taxed in proportion to his wealth. There should also be heavy taxes on all luxuries. For then either the rich will substitute socially useful for socially useless expenses or the State will receive high taxes. In either case the State will gain......and it is significant that he speaks of these proposals as tending insensibly 'to bring all fortunes nearer to that middle condition which constitutes the genuine strength of the State.

Employment income and interest income are taxed at the worst rates, while qualified dividends and capital gains are taxed much more favorably.

Capital gains harvesting can be used to eliminate capital gains taxes. Every year, realize as many capital gains as you can inside your 0 percent tax bracket by selling some ETF units. Shortly thereafter, rebuy those units back to reset your cost basis.

A reduction in common-stock holdings where needed to bring it down to a maximum of 50 per cent of the total portfolio. The capital-gains tax must be paid with as good grace as possible, and the proceeds invested in first-quality bonds or held as a savings deposit.

your brokerage costs, by trading rarely, patiently, and cheaply your ownership costs, by refusing to buy mutual funds with excessive annual expenses your expectations, by using realism, not fantasy, to forecast your returns7 your risk, by deciding how much of your total assets to put at hazard in the stock market, by diversifying, and by rebalancing your tax bills, by holding stocks for at least one year and, whenever possible, for at least five years, to lower your capital-gains liability and, most of all, your own behavior.

For example, let’s say you bought a rental house five years ago for $300,000 and rented it for three years. When your tenant moved out, you and your spouse moved in and stayed there for two years. You just sold the house for $400,000, a $100,000 capital gain. You can exclude two-fifths of that gain ($40,000) from taxes.

If you owned the house for one year or less, gains get taxed at ordinary rates (which range as high as 37 percent). If you’ve held the asset for more than a year, capital gains rates kick in (0 percent, 15 percent, or 20 percent depending on your overall income level).

I started keeping my first black investment ledger. In it I recorded all my transactions from 1963 onwards. It is vital to keep a record of all your transactions, for obvious reasons, and also for capital gains calculations for tax returns.

Instead, recognize that investing intelligently is about controlling the controllable. You can’t control whether the stocks or funds you buy will outper-forms the market today, next week, this month, or this year; in the short run, your returns will always be hostage to Mr. Market and his whims. But you can control: your brokerage costs, by trading rarely, patiently, and cheaply your ownership costs, by refusing to buy mutual funds with excessive annual expenses your expectations, by using realism, not fantasy, to forecast your returns7 your risk, by deciding how much of your total assets to put at hazard in the stock market, by diversifying, and by rebalancing your tax bills, by holding stocks for at least one year and, whenever possible, for at least five years, to lower your capital-gains liability and, most of all, your own behavior.

While the rich became richer, the taxation policy of the government, instead of correcting this trend, actively strengthened it. One of the first decisions of the first Modi government was to abolish the wealth tax that had been introduced in 1957. While the fiscal resources generated by this tax were never significant, the decision was more than a symbolic one.126 The wealth tax was replaced with an income tax increase of 2 percent for households that earned more than Rs 10 million (133,333 USD) annually.127 Few people pay income tax in India anyway: only 14.6 million people (2 percent of the population) did in 2019. As a result, the income-tax-to-GDP ratio remained below 11 percent. Not only has the Modi government not tried to introduce any reforms to change this, but it has instead increased indirect taxes (such as excise taxes), which are the most unfair as they affect everyone, irrespective of income. Taxes on alcohol and petroleum products are a case in point. As some state governments have also imposed their own taxes, this strategy means that India has one of the highest taxation rates on fuel in the world. The share of indirect taxes in the state’s fiscal resources has increased under the Modi government to reach 50 percent of the total taxes—compared to 39 percent under UPA I and 44 percent under UPA II.128 Modi’s taxation policy, a supply-side economics approach, is in keeping with the managerial rhetoric of promoting the spirit of enterprise that the prime minister, who readily presents himself as an efficiency-conscious “apolitical CEO,” relishes. One of the neoliberal measures the Modi government enacted in the name of economic rationality, right from his very first budget in 2015, was to lower the corporate tax.129 For existing companies it was reduced from 30 to 22 percent, and for manufacturing firms incorporated after October 1, 2019 that started operations before March 31, 2023, it was reduced from 25 to 15 percent—the biggest reduction in twenty-eight years. In addition to these tax reductions, the government withdrew the enhanced surcharge on long- and short-term capital gains for foreign portfolio investors as well as domestic portfolio investors.130

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining. Backlash

Mixing culture war and capitalism is not just a personal quirk shared by these three individuals; it is writ in the very manifesto of the Kansas conservative movement, the platform of the state Republican Party for 1998. Moaning that “the signs of a degenerating society are all around us,” railing against abortion and homosexuality and gun control and evolution (“a theory, not a fact”), the document went on to propound a list of demands as friendly to plutocracy as anything ever dreamed up by Monsanto or Microsoft. The platform called for: • A flat tax or national sales tax to replace the graduated income tax (in which the rich pay more than the poor). • The abolition of taxes on capital gains (that is, on money you make when you sell stock). • The abolition of the estate tax. • No “governmental intervention in health care.” • The eventual privatization of Social Security. • Privatization in general. • Deregulation in general and “the operation of the free market system without government interference.” • The turning over of all federal lands to the states. • A prohibition on “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund any election campaign.” Along

Mixing culture war and capitalism is not just a personal quirk shared by these three individuals; it is writ in the very manifesto of the Kansas conservative movement, the platform of the state Republican Party for 1998. Moaning that “the signs of a degenerating society are all around us,” railing against abortion and homosexuality and gun control and evolution (“a theory, not a fact”), the document went on to propound a list of demands as friendly to plutocracy as anything ever dreamed up by Monsanto or Microsoft. The platform called for: • A flat tax or national sales tax to replace the graduated income tax (in which the rich pay more than the poor). • The abolition of taxes on capital gains (that is, on money you make when you sell stock). • The abolition of the estate tax. • No “governmental intervention in health care.” • The eventual privatization of Social Security. • Privatization in general. • Deregulation in general and “the operation of the free market system without government interference.” • The turning over of all federal lands to the states. • A prohibition on “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund any election campaign.” Along the way the document specifically endorsed the disastrous Freedom to Farm Act, condemned agricultural price supports, and came out in favor of making soil conservation programs “voluntary,” perhaps out of nostalgia for the Dust Bowl days, when Kansans learned a healthy fear of the Almighty.17

What were we saying to the country, to our young people, when we lowered capital gains taxes and raised taxes on those who earned their living by working?,” asked Joseph Stiglitz: “That it is far better to make your living by speculation than by any other means.”39

if you were to stop working, your employment income would drop to $0. And if you were to structure your portfolio such that it earned money as dividends and capital gains, you could end up never paying taxes again.

CHECKLIST Statement of earnings from Social Security Income tax returns Checkbook records Old and current statements Gifts Winnings Loans Capital gains Illegal sources Contract labor not reported to the IRS (tips, babysitting, errands)

Property is the worst, since you’re taxed every year whether your house goes up or down in value. Employment income and interest are slightly better, because they’re taxed only when you make money. Qualified dividends and capital gains are the best.

One such way is Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate. As long as you keep trading up in value, you won’t be taxed on the gains until you liquidate. Those who don’t take advantage of these savings are missing a chance to build their asset column.

An alternative conception of full citizenship that also doesn’t regard work as a civic requirement holds that citizens are entitled to a guaranteed, unconditional basic income or initial capital stake. On this view, each individual has a right to his or her fair share of society’s assets, which have been built up over many generations; and each should be free to use this fair share as he or she sees it. Those who want to work, either for greater income or intrinsic satisfaction, are free and perhaps encouraged to do so. But those who choose not to work and instead live off their basic income or capital stake (at least for a time) are not acting unfairly toward their fellow citizens who choose to work. The goods and services that we all take advantage of are the product of, not only contributions from contemporary workers, but also work from past generations and, just as important, technological advance and nature’s bounty. On this view, there should be an all-volunteer workforce, where no one is compelled to work under threat of penalty or out of economic need. Fiscal policy would focus on growing the economy and spurring technological advance, while tax policy would distribute the gains of increased productivity equitably to all citizens and not just to those who work or own capital.

Another investor I know structured his portfolio of a few million dollars to produce income at the level he wished to spend. Accordingly, his portfolio consists mostly of short- and intermediate-term bonds, on which he pays a significant income tax. Curiously, he thinks he can only spend income, in the form of dividends and interest, and he views capital appreciation as something less real. I tried, and failed, to convince him that higher total return (after tax) means more money to spend and more money to keep, no matter how it divides between realized income and unrealized capital gains or losses. To own a stock like Berkshire Hathaway, which has never paid a dividend, and therefore produces no “income,” would be unthinkable for him. This investor’s costly preference for realized income rather than total return (economic income) is common.

The hearts of many on the Right are in cutting marginal tax rates and eliminating the capital gains tax. Good causes to be sure. But what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his country? Is whether the GDP rises at 2 or 3 or 4 percent as important as whether or not Western civilization endures and we remain one nation under God and one people? With the collapsing birthrate, open borders, and the triumph of an anti-Western multiculturalism, that is what is at issue today — the survival of America as a nation, separate and unique, and of Western civilization itself — and too many conservatives have gone AWOL in the last great fight of our lives.

On the screen, this man is wearing a bespoke suit and a smug grin, holding one of those ceremonial checks, a piece of cardboard the size of a beach towel, showily donating a million dollars to adult literacy. This is a charade, and not even a complicated one, nor convincing, just another everyday lie that everyone pretends to not notice. Another strategy for protecting the hefty bulk of his fortune by shaving off a sliver here and a sliver there, giving away little bits to ensure that he can keep the rest. One of the many manipulations available to men like him, created by men like him for the benefit of men like him, the tax structure and capital gains and mortgage-interest deductions, marriage and religion and capitalism and so-called representative democracy, all constructed so men like him could be not only the players but the house as well, everything about the game fixed in their favor, with not only backup schemes but also backups to the backups, and

Despite their shared centrism, there was an ideological difference that separated them. They championed different constituencies. Where Sinema built an alliance with Wall Street, Manchin enjoyed occasionally sticking it to the bankers, like a good old-fashioned populist from the hollers. And where Manchin felt a home-state duty to the fossil fuels industry, and personally benefited from its success, Sinema wanted to break its stranglehold over climate policy. In the course of negotiations with Schumer, Manchin had insisted on a provision ending the carried-interest loophole—a gaping unfairness in the tax code that allows hedge fund and private equity managers to count their revenue as capital gains and avoid the income tax. But Sinema had a history of defending that loophole. Manchin had every reason to believe that Sinema would despise his proposal—and that she would likely consider it a red line—but he insisted on pushing forward with it, regardless. Schumer didn’t fight Manchin. He wasn’t going to worry about his Sinema problem when it was theoretical. But now her objection was more than a theoretical source of worry. Sinema constituted the primary obstacle to the realization of Schumer’s greatest achievement, and he was stuck.

McLure and Pearlman argued that the capital-gains break should be eliminated. Income from the sale of assets, they said, should be treated just like any other income. Egger provided powerful support for that view, saying that a third of the tax code was devoted to problems caused by allowing the preferential rate for capital gains.

With the first banks opened on Monday, the afternoon brought another request from Roosevelt. Stating that he needed the tax revenue, he asked Congress that beer with alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent be made legal; the Eighteenth Amendment did not specify the percentage that constituted an intoxicating beverage. Congress complied. The House passed the bill the very next day with a vote count of 316–97, pushing it to the Senate. Wednesday brought good cheer: The stock market opened for the first time in Roosevelt’s presidency. In a single-day record, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 15 percent—a gain in total market value of $3 billion. By Thursday, for increased fiscal prudence, the Senate had added an exemption for wine to go with beer, but negotiated the alcohol content down to 3.05 percent. Throughout the week, banks were receiving net deposits rather than facing panicked withdrawals. Over the following weeks, the administration developed a sweeping farm package designed to “increase purchasing power of our farmers” and “relieve the pressure of farm mortgages.” To guarantee the safety of bank deposits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created. To regulate the entire American stock and bond markets, the Exchange Act of 1933 required companies to report their financial condition accurately to the buying public, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. Safety nets such as Social Security for retirement and home loan guarantees for individuals would be added to the government’s portfolio of responsibilities within a couple of years. It was the largest peacetime escalation of government in American history.

and it is argued that the special treatment of dividends and capital gains in the tax code is a far more lucrative entitlement program for the wealthy than any government program available to the poor.

In the US, however, you can use $3,000 per year in capital losses to offset other income when you don’t have enough capital gains to offset.

When you are in a trade, you get to deduct your expenses just like you would if you were in business. For stock traders, this is even better than for the typical business owner. You get to deduct your expenses as ordinary deductions, and your trading gains are capital gains—not ordinary income, which is taxed higher. If you don’t meet the trader rules, then your expenses are investment expenses.