this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Billionaires make money off stocks and asset gains, so taxing income higher generally only hurts the upper middle class (i.e. doctors, high earning professionals).
In Canada the average effective tax rate actually decreases once you hit like $750k (I don't have exact numbers, it's been a while since I analyzed this one) because those people stop paying as much employment tax and instead pay capital gains which are taxed at 50%.
So, if you're middle class, or upper middle class, you're paying twice as much as the millionaires and billionaires are per additional dollar made.
And that's the best case because the really rich people put their assets under a corporation and continually "reinvest" their gains while harvesting their losses (businesses pay 26.5% tax).
So Rich people pay a marginal rate of 26.5/26.8%, while the upper middle class pay 53.5% on their income.
Omg 50% capital gains tax sounds insane. I feel like that would dissuade people from investing. "Okay you invest in this asset. It might go down, which would be bad, but if it goes up you get to keep half of that and pay me the other half!"
sounds like a great deal for doing literally zero work?
But they took the risk of becoming checks notes ... a wage worker.
Whats your definition of work then? Id actually be interested...
things that wouldn't do if you don't get paid for it
They wouldnt invest in assets if they didnt get paid for it so by your own definition, they are doing work.
(And technically if someone loved their job so much that they would do it even if they didnt get the money, then they would not be doing work and still getting paid for it)...
The capital gains exemption is that you only pay tax on 50% as income.
So if I make $100k, I pay taxes on $50k, at my marginal tax rate (max of 53% in Ontario, so the effective tax rate on capital gains is at most 26.5%). If I work 9-5 and I make $100k, I'm taxed on the whole thing.
Plus if you lose money you can apply it 3 years back to get taxes back.
Ah this makes much more sense. Thank you for the explanation
I don't know any doctor or high earning professional that makes millions of dollars per year. You're still thinking about the wrong bracket. We're talking about the mega wealthy, hundreds of millions to billions in net worth. Also, no, the effective tax rate never actually decreases in Canada. You get taxed at higher percentages the more money you make. Someone making $750k a year gets taxed at a higher rate, both marginally and effectively, than someone making $50k. You're assuming that all of this extra money is just coming from capital gains. It's not.
Fair point about marginal vs effective rates. My criticism is two points:
Those are the things where I think just increasing income tax ends up burdening the middle class the most. Adding new brackets would help, updating capital gains based on income like the US does would too, so would closing loop holes and exploring new taxation strategies.