CNS News reports on one of the many exciting new taxes Americans will be forced to pay, in the wake of Taxmageddon:
A provision of President Obama’s health care law imposes a second Medicare tax on investment income for Americans classified as wealthy, effectively raising taxes on investment income and taxing investors twice.
The provision, a little-known part of ObamaCare, levies a 3.8 percent Medicare tax on investment income for couples making more than $250,000 or individuals making more than $200,000 a year. The tax is scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2013.
Just what Barack Obama’s weak economy needed – a new double tax on investment income! And it’s targeted right at small business owners, who frequently include their business income on personal taxes, pushing them over the $200,000 individual tax threshold.
The effective tax rate on capital gains, according to CNS News, will now be “23.8 percent on long-term investments and to 43.4 percent for short-term investment gains, interest, and rental income.” That’s up from 15 and 35 percent right now, respectively. And that’s just one of five new ObamaCare taxes dropping on our heads next year.
Like the $700 billion raid on Medicare, this double tax was another shifty accounting trick designed to make ObamaCare look less expensive than it really is. If ObamaCare were any sort of private-sector program, its authors would have long ago been jailed for fraud.
This sort of double taxation is profoundly unethical, but not at all unique. It’s not that hard to find individual dollars taxed three or four times as they pass through the hands of certain private citizens. Double taxation makes mincemeat of the “fairness” argument trotted out by Big Government enthusiasts – how can it possibly be ”fair” to tax the same dollar twice, just because the person who earned it chose to invest it? Never mind the foolishness of placing even more disincentives in the path of healthy private-sector investment, in a time of shaky business confidence and stagnant employment.
