{"id":42412,"date":"2014-06-03T10:47:50","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T14:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/?p=42412"},"modified":"2014-06-03T10:47:50","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T14:47:50","slug":"why-doesnt-obama-end-the-hedge-fund-tax-break","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/06\/2014\/why-doesnt-obama-end-the-hedge-fund-tax-break.html","title":{"rendered":"Why Doesn\u2019t Obama End the Hedge Fund Tax Break?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"text text-1 parbase section\" style=\"color: #281b21;\">\n<p>Slate.com &#8211; The Obama administration could disable one of the most powerful sources of wealth and income inequality in our country. Yet no one ever mentions it as a possibility. Don\u2019t they know?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"text-2 text parbase section\" style=\"color: #281b21;\">\n<p>There have always been disparities in income, of course, but the gap now isn\u2019t so much between the rich and poor as between the super-rich and everyone else. There\u2019s no more dramatic example of this than the astronomical income of hedge fund managers and traders, and the special tax break that allows them to pocket so much of that income. The most remarkable aspect of this fabulous new wealth is that much of it is simply a gift from the government\u2014a gift that could be eliminated by the stroke of a pen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"text-3 text parbase section\" style=\"color: #281b21;\">\n<p>A quick refresher on how the tax break works: An executive salary is taxed at 39 percent, the highest rate for earned income. But the income of a hedge fund manager is taxed at only 20 percent, which is the highest long-range capital gains rate\u2014even though the hedge fund manager is deriving income that\u2019s as directly earned as the wages of a steelworker. He made money when he established his fund. But the rule for hedge funds is that the \u201crealization event\u201d\u2014when income is realized\u2014is not known until later, so \u201ccarried interest\u201d turns the income into a capital gain. This is what\u2019s known as a legal fiction, which means that it\u2019s a great big lie.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/business\/moneybox\/2014\/06\/taxation_of_carried_interest_the_loophole_for_hedge_fund_managers_could.html\">Read full Story<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Slate.com &#8211; The Obama administration could disable one of the most powerful sources of wealth and income inequality in our country. Yet no one ever mentions it as a possibility. Don\u2019t they know? There have always been disparities in income, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syndicated"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42415,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42412\/revisions\/42415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}