The Joe Biden Capital Gains Tax Proposal

This is an apolitical podcast. The goal is to call out fiscal irresponsibility no matter what side of the aisle it’s on. It’s less about politics and more about math.

Joe Biden recently came up with a proposal to reform capital gains taxes. The increased revenue that is thought to come from this reform is earmarked to pay for childcare, universal pre-kindergarten education, and paid leave for workers.

The state of capital gains taxes currently is that if you are in the 10% or 12% tax bracket you don’t pay any capital gains taxes. It currently sits at 20% for people above those brackets and for people making more than $250,000 per year there is an additional surtax of 3.8%. This puts the baseline for wealthy Americans at 23.8%.

When it comes to capital gains tax, there are four different taxes that may come into play. The first is at the federal level, then there are also state capital gains taxes and local capital gains taxes in some parts of the country, and finally the Obamacare surtax.

The Biden proposal basically says that anyone who makes more than a million dollars per year would see their federal capital gains tax go from 20% to 39.6%.

If you lived in New York City and included the other governmental layers of capital gains taxes, this would result in a total capital gains tax of 58.2%. Residents of Portland, Oregon would be looking at a capital gains tax of 57.3%.

This doubling of the federal capital gains tax rate would generate roughly $1 trillion in additional revenue.

This proposal will not likely pass through the usual route and would likely have to come through budget reconciliation. In its current form, the proposal will not likely pass because there are Democrats who believe that the tax is too high.

Most people see the bill as the initial salvo in the negotiation process and the end result will be somewhere in the middle.

Compared to other countries, this proposal would put America at the top of the list for capital gains taxes.

If you make more than a million dollars per year, this proposal will likely affect you quite a bit. If you make less than that, you won’t have to worry about it. If you’re concerned about capital gains tax rates, you need to stop accumulating huge amounts of money in your taxable bucket.

Raising capital gains taxes is not going to solve our country’s problems. We need to see broad base increases in taxes across the board and dramatic reductions in spending.

If you want to protect yourself from the inevitability of higher capital gains taxes, you need to stop accumulating money in your taxable bucket and take advantage of all the tax havens that are available to you. The Roth IRA and Roth 401(k) are great options and allow you to put a lot of money into tax-free vehicles.

There are unlimited amounts of money that can be converted to the tax-free bucket with Roth conversions.

The LIRP is the great antidote to taxation in the taxable bucket. Someone is going to get your money, you might as well get something useful in exchange for it. There are no income limitations or contribution limits with the LIRP.

Whether you make a million dollars a year or not, there are a number of alternatives to situate assets to grow tax-free wealth without having to worry about what’s coming down the pipe with regards to taxes.

One of the fundamental issues with these tax raises is that they are always earmarked for some new initiative and never aimed at restructuring or fixing the entitlement programs that are driving the fiscal problems in our country.