*sigh* Talking points in the making. Reducing our budget deficit, while nice, means absolutely nothing in regards to our debt, and less than nothing in regards to our unfunded liabilities.
This means precisely nothing.
A lot of the big jump in income is special dividends by companies trying to beat a possible jump in the dividend tax rate from 15% to 43 %.
Although the tax never happened, many companies jumped their dividends to the last part of 2012.
On a personal level, I took about 100K of cap gains in 2012 just in case the cap gains tax jump. This was a one time event for me as I sold stock I held a long time and bought it back the next day (the wash sale rule applies only to losses, not to gains.)