I would be fine if there was a mandatory 5 year holding period before you could get a light tax break. It is smart to incentivize investment activities.
There is. Capital gains taxes are broken into two categories - short term and long term. But stocks transition to long term after only six months and the tax brackets are better than that for normal income.
6 months is nothing though, just two quarters. It still incentivizes CEOs to make short term decisions. 5 years is a decent time frame that I think would make CEOs rethink the quarterly mentality.
Yeah, I dislike the simplification that brings it down to just two sets of brackets. It really just needs to be an easily tuneable continuous function of profits and time. If you make a fuckton of profit, you’ll pay a fuckton of tax. If you wait longer, you pay less tax. If the profit is small enough, guess what? No tax. So the middle class day traders wont lose their ass and they can have some fun. But the whales are going to have to fear Captain Tax Man Ahab, regardless of if they wait 6 months or not.
But I dont make the laws. Wallstreet does.
