Clinton Calls for Ending Tax Break to Financiers

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/washington/13cnd-clinton.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1184363110-gfmRl&oref=slogin

Clinton Calls for Ending Tax Break to Financiers

By DAVID STOUT
Published: July 13, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 13 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today became the latest presidential candidate to announce her support for ending a tax break that has enabled some wealthy financiers to shave enormous amounts of money from their income tax bills.

Senator Clinton, speaking at a rally in New Hampshire, called for ending a “glaring inequity” that allows investment managers in certain partnerships to take large amounts of their compensation in the form of performance fees or “carried interest,” which is taxed at the 15 percent capital gains rate rather than at income tax rates as high as 35 percent.

“Our tax code should be valuing hard work and helping middle-class and working families get ahead,” the senator said in Keene, N.H., as she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. “It offends our values as a nation when an investment manager making $50 million can pay a lower tax rate on her earned income than a teacher making $50,000 pays on her income.”

If she is elected president, Senator Clinton said, she will work to reform the tax code to ensure that carried interest “is recognized for what it is: ordinary income that should be taxed at ordinary income tax rates.”

The debate over carried interest is already bubbling up in Congress, and Senator Clinton’s speech today could portend its emergence as an issue in the 2008 presidential race, and perhaps Congressional contests as well. Two other Democratic presidential hopefuls, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina (the only Democratic candidate to have worked for a hedge fund), have also called for taxing carried interest at regular income tax rates.

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[hfojvt]

1. I am against this

The whole bullsh*t capital gains and dividend tax rates need to be eliminated.

Tax dividends and capital gains at the same rate as wage income.

Problem solved. Actually, alot of problems solved.

[Ron Green]

2. Wait a minute . . . aren't these the very people that are giving her lots of money???