Free Republic

Donald Trump has told lawmakers he wants to end the special tax treatment of private equity and hedge fund profits known as “carried interest”, setting up a potential clash with America’s wealthiest financiers. The push by Trump — in a White House meeting on Thursday with Republican leaders from Capitol Hill — comes as the president intensifies talks over a broader tax cut bill he wants passed this year that is core to his domestic economic agenda. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters that Trump had “laid out” his “tax priorities” to the lawmakers, including measures to...

According to the Republican senator from Kentucky, Small businesses organized as S-Corps or Partnerships could face a tax increase and hurt job creation. The NIIT is a 3.8% surtax on passive income (capital gains, interest, rental and royalty income, and dividends). However, the proposal suggests expanding the tax to apply to active income over $400,000 individually or $500,000 jointly. The proposed expansion of NIIT is expected to raise some $183.6 billion in tax revenues over the next decade, according to the Tax Foundation. The bill proposes to expand the taxation to include all business income, whether or not the taxpayer...

Any tax increase that specifically targets private equity, venture capital, real estate and other long-term business investments is counterproductive to reaching that goal Margaret Thatcher reminded us that one of the problems with socialism is you “eventually run out of other people’s money,” but that doesn’t stop liberals like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) from finding more sources. His latest crusade is an effort to increase taxes on investment income – namely carried interest capital gains. For several years Schumer opposed increasing capital gains on carried interest, but now, after declaring he will work with President Trump when he...

The reality and the myths of taxing financial firms. Donald Trump has promised that he will ease burdens on the middle class by going after “the hedge-fund guys,” who, he believes, do not pay enough in taxes. “They’re making a tremendous amount of money — they have to pay taxes,” he says. Because the one thing in which Trump is consistent is his vagueness, it is not 100 percent clear whether what he is talking about is the so-called carried-interest loophole, which is very much on the minds of people with economic-policy views similar to Trump’s — meaning Bernie Sanders...

Mitt Romney’s release of his tax returns has pushed the arcane issue of “carried interest” — the share of an investment fund’s profits given to its managers as payment for their services – back into the headlines. Critics have renewed their calls to tax the carried interest as ordinary income. Unfortunately, the populist rhetoric used by some critics can obscure the facts about how carried interest is actually taxed.