Capital Income Quotes

Modern views show that capitalistic income is not an exploitation, but that in the profits, taken as a whole, a part of the value that has been created is really due to the land or the capital.

It's not fair to say that people who work with their head or with their hands ought to pay taxes, but people who earn their living with capital ought not to.

Why do we fully tax some kinds of income from capital, like interest and dividends; partially tax other kinds like capital gains; defer tax on other kinds, like IRAs; and impose no tax at all on still other types of capital income, like interest on municipal bonds? This simply is not rational. These distinctions don't have any inherent logic.

When you tax capital gains income, you don't help the economy, you hurt the economy, which is why President Kennedy, President Reagan, President Clinton and President Bush all believed we should have a lower rate for capital gains.

In the old 20th-century income distribution system, the shares of income going to capital, mainly in profits, and labor, in wages and non-wage benefits, were roughly stable. But that system is no more.

In the course of the twenty-first century what may be called the "capital wage" could be added to the labor wage and the social wage, so that middle-class Americans - not merely an affluent minority - might derive income from three sources rather than just two.

Capital, however capital may be defined, would practically cease to exist as an income producing fund, for the simple reason that if money, wherewith to buy capital, could be obtained for one-half of one per cent, capital itself could command no higher price.

The biggest revenue target is the preferential rate for long-term capital gains, which raises a perennial question: Why should capital income be taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income? Capital assets are owned overwhelmingly by the rich.

One of the tax systems in the US is for wage earners. The government takes money from them out of each paycheck - so it knows how much they make, and those workers can't cheat to any significant degree. But the other tax system is for capital. Those with capital get to tell the government what they want to tell. They may get audited, but if their tax returns are of any size the government doesn't have enough of the smart auditors to figure out what's really going on. And there are the rules that allow you to do things like take in money today and pay taxes on it thirty years from now.