Add Stan Druckenmiller, "the legendary investor who made a fortune predicting the subprime bust," to those who believe there's no reason to tax capital gains at a lower rate than wages--and powerful reason to tax them equally.
Druckenmiller's recommendation came about half-way through a recent Tom Friedman column in The New York Times, "Sorry, Kids. We Ate It All," and it wasn't Friedman's main point. As the headline indicates, he was really taking aim at the boomer-generation tilt of our current tax laws and entitlement programs.
But to me the most eye-catching lines in the piece were these:
"Druckenmiller urges young people to design their own solutions, but, when asked, he recommends: raising taxes on capital gains, dividends and carried interest — now hugely weighted to the wealthy and elderly — to make them equal to earned income taxes..."
With that thought, Druckenmiller adds his powerful voice to others who have taken the same position. Who might those others be? Well, let's see. There's President Obama's deficit commission, Simpson-Bowles; and there's the report filed on the heels of Simpson-Bowles by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Both were blue-ribbon groups, and both concluded that capital gains should be taxed at the same rates as wages. (Full disclosure: both Simpson-Bowles and the Bipartisan Policy Center also recommended lower marginal rates.)
And there's another famous investor who's also come down on the side of equal taxes: the sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett.