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Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner offered a glimmer of hope to investors who are facing huge tax increases on capital gains and dividends next January. In a CNBC interview late Wednesday, Geithner said the Obama administration still hopes to hold the top tax rate on both capital gains and dividends to 20% next year – the level the White House has been proposing since taking office. Of course, a 20% rate would represent a big increase over the current 15%. But it’s a lot better than the 39.6% top rate for dividends that congressional Democrats have signaled they were planning next...

Taxes: On the eve of President Obama's first State of the Union address, two Democratic congressmen are advising him to extend the Bush tax cuts instead of letting them expire. Now that's a stimulus. We hear that the administration is considering taking a more populist tack as it sails the choppy political waters of 2010. Some of President Obama's plans reportedly include several tax tidbits for the "middle class," including a doubling of the child care tax credit for families below $85,000 in income, and $1.6 billion for child care and a cap on student loan payments. Such transparent populism...

... Buried in Nancy Pelosi's health-care bill is a provision that will partially repeal tax indexing for inflation, meaning that as their earnings rise over a lifetime these youngsters can look forward to paying higher rates even if their income gains aren't real. In order to raise enough money to make their plan look like it won't add to the deficit, House Democrats have deliberately not indexed two main tax features of their plan: the $500,000 threshold for the 5.4-percentage-point income tax surcharge; and the payroll level at which small businesses must pay a new 8% tax penalty for not...

The Case-Shiller home-price index increased yesterday for the third month in a row. That’s terrific news. After a 40 to 50 percent drop in home prices in recent years, sales are picking up, because prices are way down. That’s also great. Markets work. But here’s what I don’t like about this story: Big, central-planning, government-directed tax preferences for housing, like the $8,000 dollar tax credit for new buyers. Or even the popular mortgage interest deduction. And let’s not forget perhaps the biggest one of all: Home sales are basically capital-gains-tax free. That passed back in 1997. Many people (including myself)...

One question we wish someone had asked President Obama at last night's press conference is this: Why doesn't his economic stimulus bill include his own campaign proposal to eliminate the capital-gains tax for small businesses? The House bill omits it entirely, and the Senate version offers a rate reduction to 7% from the current 14%, but only on investments made in the next two years. That lower rate would apply to less than 2% of all capital gains. Mr. Obama's original promise to cancel the capital gains tax for small enterprises was highlighted on his campaign Web site under "Small...

Even as economic losses and unemployment levels mount, America's most effective engine for wealth and job creation is being dangerously -- perhaps fatally -- compromised.

I am either dumb of he is. Can someone please explain what the "capital gains tax" on small business is all about. Thanks in advance

For the past sixty years, whenever a presidential candidate is down in the polls days before Election Day, Harry Truman's victory in 1948 inevitable comes up. Of all the comebacks, Truman's still ranks as the most startling, down to the premature headline published by the staunch Republican media mogul Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune the day after the election: "Dewey Defeats Truman!" A month before the election, Thomas Dewey, the Republican governor of New York, had a double digit lead over Truman. Most pollsters simply stopped polling, believing that voters made their minds up well before Election Day. Of the 50...

Rooney family might hurry the sale on fears of Obama getting elected.

Chris Edwards is director of tax policy studies and author of Downsizing the Federal Government. On St. Patrick's Day, we wear green and celebrate the culture of Ireland. I'll be down at the pub tomorrow, but I'll be toasting Ireland's success at attracting greenbacks -- all that investment flowing into the Emerald Isle and the resulting prosperity. Ireland has boomed in recent years, and it now boasts the fourth highest gross domestic product per capita in the world. In the mid-1980s, Ireland was a backwater with an average income level 30 percent below that of the European Union. Today, Irish...

Sorry for the vanity, but I figure there are a few folks here on FreeRepublic who might be able to help me with this. I'm looking for some information about capital gains taxes (Federal) and how they are applied to a specific situation. I'll check with my tax accountant myself if/when the need arises, but for now I'm just checking to see how this would apply to a hypothetical situation that may or may not become a reality. Here's the scenario . . . Suppose I am an employee in a closed corporation and I am given the opportunity to...

How many times have we heard liberals exhorting America to act like the rest of the world? For literally decades, the denizens of the left have been badgering us to adopt socialized medicine, abolish capital punishment, and support other "progressive" measures so we can appear more "enlightened" to their friends in Old Europe and other lovely places. Never mind that their ideas are anything but progressive, particularly if by "progressive" we mean the achievement of actual progress. Hyper-progressive France, for instance, has had double-digit unemployment for most of the past quarter century, even with a 35-hour work week; its youth...

Capital gains tax revenues have increased in the three years since President Bush cut the capital gains tax rate, proving free-market economists right, and bureaucrats wrong. As Nobel laureate Milton Friedman often says, when you tax something you get less of it, and when you tax something less you get more of it. The "it" in this case is capital gains, which are the amount of money you make when you sell something for more than you paid for it. Capital gains have jumped because the rate reduction boosted the after-tax return on capital, reviving the stock market as well...