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Comment by surge | Hacker News Reader

You're also not factoring in risk that comes from investing, the argument is lower taxes on investments encourages people to invest their money. If there is risk of loss, plus high taxes when there are actual gains, there is lower return on investment and therefore, less incentive to risk your money in investments.

It's already been mentioned that some of the money has been taxed once already, when the corporation pays taxes on profits before they're paid out as dividends.

I imagine large investors will just break up their investments into so many shell companies/trusts that each entity will never carry more than 1M in investments. There's always a loophole.

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> It's already been mentioned that some of the money has been taxed once already, when the corporation pays taxes on profits before they're paid out as dividends.

I never understood "double taxation" arguments. Currency circulates, of course a given dollar will get taxed more than once as it moves around the economy.

The issue here isn't "double taxation" so much as "equitable taxation". There's a theory that economically equivalent situations should face equal tax burdens; if you compare the situations of "person is a sole proprietor" vs "person creates a corporation which earns profits and pays them out as dividends" you conclude E = C + (1-C) D, where E is the tax rate on earned income, C is the corporate tax rate, and D is the dividend tax rate.

In Canada, we don't have a separate "dividend tax rate" but instead taxpayers who receive dividends get a credit for the amount of taxes the corporation paid "on their behalf".

If you can still credit past losses against your gains, that should account for the risk shouldn't it?

only if you are assume that each person is coming out positive in eventuality. there exist always some person who has lose, maybe he is having for to withdraw money for covering expenses or retirementing.

If you never come out positive, capital gains tax is the least of your worries.

Investment risk is already addressed with this proposal. The top tax bracket for earned income is way lower - something like $450k.

Given current interest rates it seems like the world has too much money to invest and not enough people spending.

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