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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Tax lawyer here.

Virtually every country in the developed world has much lower LTCG taxes than income taxes. It is so ubiquitous that I'm not even aware of a counter-example. Quite a few countries in western Europe have lower max LTCG rates than Silicon Valley has today.

That's simply false. The US has the lowest effective individual capital tax rates in the world outside of tax shelter countries. When I was at a firm, I had many (former EU) clients who came to the US who marveled at how low our taxes were here in CA compared to what they were paying at home.

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That isnt the point, the point was that capital gains taxes are lower than general income taxes. For example in Germany its 25% capital gains vs 42% general income (the latter is a progressive rate, but 42% starts at 58k/116k eur single/married).

Yes, those rates are higher than the US, but capital gains taxes are lower than wage income taxes.

https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/germany/individual/income-deter...

No, his point was trying to claim that the U.S. has higher rates than other Western countries, and that was simply false.

(Yes, capital gains rates are generally lower than normal income rates everywhere in the world, but the rest of the world also defines capital gains more narrowly than the U.S. does, and for example, sales of startup stock would likely not qualify for cap gains treatment in Germany).

> The US has the lowest effective individual capital tax rates in the world outside of tax shelter countries.

The capital gains rate in the UK is 20%.

https://www.gov.uk/capital-gains-tax/rates

The top capital gains rate in the US is 23.8% + state taxes.

The top US capital gains tax is 20%. The 3.8% is a separate tax...

That being said, I'm taking about effective (i.e. Actual tax liabilities) and you are all focusing on theoretical liabilities without understanding that the tax bases are different.

It's honestly not worth the effort to keep correcting all the GUD in this thread.

> The top US capital gains tax is 20%. The 3.8% is a separate tax

A tax on, among other things, capital gains. See:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/questions-and-answers-on-the-ne...

"8. What is included in Net Investment Income?

In general, investment income includes, but is not limited to: interest, dividends, capital gains..."

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