capital_gains unhinged 'because capital gains income receives such preferential treatment, america's wealthiest families - a group whose incomes average more than $345 million annually and stem mostly from rents, interest and dividend, rather than active labor - actually pay taxes at a lower rate than households with average incomes as low as $75,000. in fact, the nation's wealthiest four hundred families have a total effective tax rate averaging about 16.6 percent of their income, essentially the same as the 16.3 percent average paid by households with annual earnings as low as $50,000. fully ninety percent of all benefits from the preferential treatment of capital gains income accrue to taxpayers with more than $200,000 in annual income, with seventy-eight percent of benefits received by those earning more than a half-million dollars per year. by 2015, it is estimated that the typical taxpayer with more than $1 million in income will save more than $131,000 in taxes each year on average, all because of this provision in the tax code that treats investment income more favorably than income earned from work. currently, the wealthiest one percent of americans make more annually from capital gains - not from actual work, but from interest, dividends and rents on things they already possess, even if they didn't work one hour of the year - than the entire cost of all safety net program payouts in the united states *combined*, including social security, medicare and medicaid. and yet this income, received by about three million people, is taxed at a lower rate than the income earned by construction workers, physicians, food inspectors or law enforcement officials.' - tim wise 181003 what's it to you? who go blather from