[jrochkind1]

Another example of how taxing capital gains at less than 'ordinary' income has all sorts of weird and often undesirable effects.

Of course, I guess the argument for it is that it has the favorable effect of encouraging capital investment, that's what it's supposed to do right? I am curious what evidence there is of how well it does that.

According to wikipedia, capital gains were taxed as ordinary income in the U.S. until 1921, and the history since then have gone up and down -- but are currently at their historical low. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United....

[ageek123]

In many countries, capital gains are not taxed at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax

[jrochkind1]

I haven't actually counted it up from the wikipedia article, just skimmed, but looks like maybe mostly "developing"/"third world" countries? Which are desperate to attract capital investment, and usually not entirely in control of their own fiscal policies.