Honoring Labor

Something that bugs me about our tax code in the US is that we tax labor more than capital.

If you make $100,000 of gains on your purchase of Tesla stock you pay 15% of those gains to the IRS.

But if, instead, you earned that $100k of income as a school teacher, you would pay 22-24% of that income to the IRS (depending on if you are married and filing jointly or single).

This tax policy values capital over labor and seems wrong to me.

I think it would be better policy to lower the income tax rate and raise the capital gains rate to something like 20% so that all income is taxed equally no matter how it is achieved and so they the net impact on revenues is neutral.

It’s fine to have a federal holiday called Labor Day to recognize the contributions from working people but an even more powerful gesture would be to stop taxing their work more than your stock market gains.