From a tax perspective it’s not the same - not least because it’s hard to pin down when the money was earned- if you bought shares 10 years ago, and their value increased 8 years ago and then you held them for 8 years before selling this year when do you say the gain was? If you paying a low rate of income tax 8 years ago should you pay that on the gain? You can say 20% is too low, but you can’t treat it like earned income.
Likewise you do earn it in a sense (if everything is working right) - you give up the ability to access that cash and accept you might make a loss
If you’re just objecting to the idea you can use money to make money - Ok, but that seems to be an intrinsic property of money and there’s not much to be done about it.
It’s still “income” in the sense that it’s money comeing in to his account. Only difference is that he didn’t even need to do anything to earn it.
We used to tax capital gains at the same rate as income until it was slashed in 2008.
You’re right about the slash by Brown in 2008 - it was 40% under Lawson (Conservative) - that should be revisited
From a tax perspective it’s not the same - not least because it’s hard to pin down when the money was earned- if you bought shares 10 years ago, and their value increased 8 years ago and then you held them for 8 years before selling this year when do you say the gain was? If you paying a low rate of income tax 8 years ago should you pay that on the gain? You can say 20% is too low, but you can’t treat it like earned income.
Likewise you do earn it in a sense (if everything is working right) - you give up the ability to access that cash and accept you might make a loss
If you’re just objecting to the idea you can use money to make money - Ok, but that seems to be an intrinsic property of money and there’s not much to be done about it.