If the average worker has any stock or index fund investments, that worker absolutely can take advantage of this (in the U.S.). It's called tax-loss harvesting - worth reading about here [1].
There is no limit to the amount of capital losses carried over (i.e. harvested) year to year. These must first be applied against any capital gains (no limit AFAIK.) The $3000 limit applies to the annual amount of capital losses that may be written off against other income.
Example, in year 1 you have a $15,000 net capital loss. You write off the maximum $3,000 of this against your other income, carrying over a $12,000 capital loss. In year 2 you have a $10,000 net capital gain, this is offset against your carried over loss leaving $2,000 to write off against your income.
One of the reasons why it makes sense to have different rules for investment income is investment income tax (at least if you're investing in a corporative stock) is a double tax - the corporation you invest in is taxed on its profit (so your income from it is less than it would be) and then your income from it is taxed again. It kinda makes sense that parts of the double tax would be less than the single one.
Of course, there's a political component of it too - taxes are always political, and are used to promote or suppress certain actions. I guess the government does want to promote long-term investment and thus defines lower tax rates for this activity.
This is only true of dividends. But I don't think it wasn't true of stock buybacks.
Also there is plenty of business income that is not double taxed because it isn't run through a C Corp.
Then in regards to incentives. We already have interest rates to adjust the knobs of investment versus consumption. Capital gains is just a way to make the tax system less progressive.
Stock buybacks come from profits which are taxed, and those who sell the shares back to the company also have to pay capital gains tax. And S corp income is taxed at personal income rates, not capital gains rates (except for some ridiculous 20% rebates in some situations in the new tax law (but is still higher than capital gains)).
There is. Basic level of labor is almost always there - people have to work to earn the living (even if you go into crime, you still have to work - maybe you pay taxes to different people and do different things, but you still have to do stuff to earn your money).
However, once you earned enough money, beyond subsistence level, you have a choice - you can spend it all on consumption, or you can defer some of the consumption, or give up a part of it, as an investment, in hope that this would increase your consumption abilities in the future, or you ability to retire, etc. Modern economy would not work without investment - you need massive upfront spending to lift off something like Netflix of the ground, before it starts being profitable.
This investment is, ultimately, financed by people who chose investment over consumption (might be one very rich person, or tens of thousands of not so rich people giving their money to the bank, which in turn loans it to the entrepreneurs, or likely a mix of both). Ensuring this choice remains a viable and attractive one is something that the government would definitely have an incentive to support.
This is predicted on the unstated assumption that everyone starts out from about the same place and subsequently people make a variety of different choices. It ignores the effect of inheritance or the costs of increasingly binomial wealth distribution.
At least in the US, old money effects are not as huge as one would think. Of course, everybody knows about Donald Trump, and maybe other people with inherited wealth, but there's also the survivorship effect - if somebody had rich parents and spent all the wealth how likely you to read about him in the national press? Nobody cares about those.
Moving onto more statistical approach, this one: https://www.fa-mag.com/news/most-millionaires-self-made--stu... says only 8% of millionaires inherited their wealth. For billionaires, according to this: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/269593 18% got a jump-start (maybe parents were mere millionaires, but the child became a billionaire), and 62% are self-made.
So inheritance effects exist, but maybe they are not that huge? At least, clearly, not a majority.
Of course, not everybody starts in the same place. But human behavior and motivations are similar, and thus you can reason about them despite the differences.
Labor doesn't necessarily generate income. Factory workers are an up-front cost converting one set of resources into another. No income is realized until that second set of resources (i.e. products) are actually sold.
Also, realize that the government does promote both labor and investments, just through different means. Lowering taxes isn't going to affect how a fully employed individual produces labor; they are trading their time for money. Lowering taxes on investment will promote more investments, since the money for those investments have already been taxed, and since the trade of investments is money-now for money-later, taxes have a much more significant influence over the extent to which someone will invest in a business. Someone fully invested in other things (non-stock commodities, etc) might move some of their investments into businesses instead.
At risk of bottoming out on the threaded replies, I'd be interested in talking through how that would work...
Let's say you wanted to give income from labor the same benefits as (negative) income from investments that lost money... How would you do that?
Say I earn a healthy $250K/year at my W-2 job. If I buy a large house with the proceeds from my job, have I incurred a loss? How about if I eat out at an expensive restaurant every night, spending my entire paycheck. Do I get to avoid taxes by keeping my lifestyle expensive?
Regarding a house it would be considered an asset, similar to buying stock.
That being said a corporatiom is not a person, and cannot eat a fancy dinner, so much of their profit can only become reinvested back into paying people who ultimately get taxed for eating fancy dinners.
Aren't similar expenses be used by businesses? Bought an expensive building or paid for all your sales people to take clients out for dinner and drinks.
Let's say you wanted to give income from labor the same benefits as (negative) income from investments that lost money... How would you do that?
I am not all that sure about carrying forward investment losses, and as you are aware some expenses are deductible while some are not. While eating a fancy restaurant is strictly optional, spending on medical of educational costs are quite different.
In general I think if someone investigates the edge cases first (eg looking at the second-order effect like carrying deductions on negative income) that's a sign of not wanting to look at the larger picture.
From your edge-case comment, it sounds like you'd prefer that losses from business income not roll over, rather than making rollovers accessible to individuals. I was approaching it the other way - trying to see if there was a reasonable way to credit individuals with a "P&L" view of their finances that could cross multiple years.
As you indicated above, so much of our personal expenses are "discretionary" in the sense that we could increase or lower them by choice. That's exactly the difference between business investment spending (required to produce the revenue that's taxed) vs. personal income/spending, which is based strongly on preferences. Hard to justify taxing frugal individuals more than lavish spenders just because they save a larger percentage of their income...
From a purely theoretical standpoint, I’m terribly curious what would happen if we incentivized spending like that. I’m sure it’d be terrible in the long run, but it’d also have definite macroeconomic stimulus effects.
The lenient rates were introduced during high-inflation years. If somebody was pursuing a long-term project spanning over several years (let's say, building a new apartment complex), high punitive tax rates at liquidity time (let's say, 5 years down the road) combined with decreased buying would obliterate any real profitability.
The 12-month cut-off window, though, seems completely arbitrary.
The argument is kinda moot anyways, as capital gains are completely voluntary - one sells when they want to sell. If they don't want to sell, but need liquidity, they can access a bunch of asset-backed loans (HELOCs, PALs, cashout refinance, etc.) Ken Fisher in his book "Debunkery" (and I'm sure the data exists elsewhere) shows how total revenue figures collected by US government do not change over decades, regardless of the actual capital gains rates.
This is a very interesting point. It seems to me that we should tax capital gains at normal income rates, but only after adjusting the cost basis for inflation. It’s a little insane that we pay tax on the inflation adjustments for TIPs and other supposedly inflation neutral instruments, which all but guarantees that they lose money every year.
Yes, incorporating inflation sets the stage for increasing the capital-gains tax.
I am not sure what the counter-argument to that is, but one thing I can think of is increased complexity of a tax return for an average joe investor, who bought and sold a few funds in his portfolio. Opponents will also likely point that an official measure - CPI - can be manipulated for political purposes.
I think if you could separate out your income into business and personal expenses then I think you have a case for that kind of tax policy since you would be 'investing in yourself' but the current tax system covers a lot of that with deductions.
lol yes there is. If investment income is taxed at 50% (top federal bracket + top state income tax rate) then who in their right mind is going to risk their capital? lol, I know I absolutely wouldn't.
Then what would you do with all your capital? Sit on it? I highly doubt it. You'd either spend it (which is good) or invest it because 50% of more money is still more money.
That is not how marginal tax rates work. I'm also completely fine moving to an inflation based basis system if capital gets the same tax treatment as labor.
Tax-loss harvesting is different than carrying losses from previous years forward. And in the case of tax-loss harvesting, the company wouldn't be realizing massive profits for that year because said profits would be offset by investment losses.
The very fact that parent comment is getting downvoted shows what a bubble this (the HN) community is. If you think the average US working-class person is able to save, let alone have investments, I'd love to see some data to back that up.
[1] https://www.madfientist.com/tax-loss-harvesting/