USA Today on Income Taxes

Wow, this is a USA Today editorial:

Our view on income inequality: Wealth money managers make more, get taxed less Mon Jul 23, 12:22 AM ET



As many business executives, doctors, lawyers and other skilled professional know, the top income tax rate is 35%. The top rate on dividends and long-term capital gains is 15%.


Whether it makes sense to tax the output of expertise and hard work at more than twice the rate of investment returns is debatable. But, for better or worse, that's the way it is.


Except, that is, when it isn't. Owners of companies, ranging from small real estate partnerships to multibillion dollar hedge funds and private equity firms, have devised a way to erase this distinction. Their managers pay 15% on their income by dressing it up as investment returns — even though they bear no investment risk or put none of their own money in play.


Nice work if you can get it. But in this case it constitutes a frontal assault on fairness. Why should such people pay only 15% when senior corporate executives pay 35% for making many of the same types of business decisions? More to the point, it's hard to see the logic (or the justice) in a school teacher or bus driver with taxable annual family income as low as $63,700 paying 25% when someone like Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman can make nearly $700 million on the day his firm went public and pay at most 15%.


Congress is rightfully re-examining the issue. Reps. Sandy Levin, D-Mich., and Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., have a proposal. In the Senate, Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have a useful, if narrower, bill.


The practice they are seeking to ban or limit is a transparent ruse. Here's how it works using the example of a private equity firm: The partners raise capital from banks, pension funds and other large investors, which they use to buy companies and resell them. Their investors give them some direct compensation, which is taxable as income.


But most of the compensation comes in the form of an investment vehicle known as "carried interest," which gives them a right to a portion of the profits they generate (typically 20%). That portion of the profit is taxed 15%, just as if they supplied 20% of the capital at the outset.


It's a creative practice, but with a result that says the rich get to write their own rules. That's not a new problem in the American tax system, but it is nevertheless repulsive. Income is income, or so you'd think.


Supporters of this scam argue that these money managers actually are risking their own investments. It's just not money, in their case, but their "sweat equity," their time, their expertise. But the same could be said of the lawyer who takes a case on a contingency fee, the movie actor who negotiates a cut of the box office receipts, the financier who chooses to work for a firm known for paying enormous bonuses during good years. In most, if not all, of such cases, these people pay income taxes.


And so should partners in these exotic investment firms. More so because the tax they avoid paying is money that has to be made up by people of lesser means — or borrowed from later generations by adding to the budget deficit.


These schemes add insult to injury at a time of increasing wealth concentration. It is time to end them.