My father-in-law came to visit this week, and over Friday night pizza, the conversation turned to politics; specifically, Mitt Romney’s much-ballyhooed 13.9% effective tax rate in 2010.
Being a tax guy, I wanted my father-in-law to understand exactly why Romney’s rate was so low given his $21,000,000 of AGI, which required a primer on the taxation of carried interest. [For your own primer, click here.]
As the discussion advanced, my father-in-law understandably struggled to understand why the profits received by private equity fund managers on their carried interest were taxed any differently than, say, the wages he earned over his 40-year career working for an insurance carrier.
Even after I advanced the standard arguments for a 15% rate on carried interest — the equity fund manager’s risk, the uncertainty of the profit stream, the “sweat equity” element, etc… — my father-in-law’s opinion remained blissfully simple:
“It still sounds like compensation to me.”
Now, my father-in-law is a staunch Republican in every way, shape and form. But yet, he failed to see how a 15% tax rate is justified on the income received by fund managers to do what they do: manage funds. Of course, my father-in-law is not the final arbitrator on such matters: after all, this is the same man who once advised me to buy a house located squarely within the Delaware River’s floodplain.
So perhaps you should decide for yourself. To facilitate your decision-making process, the Wall Street Journal has published this point/counterpoint on the carried interest tax issue, with Michael Graetz, a professor of tax law at Columbia Law School, arguing for carried interest to be taxed as ordinary income, while David Tuerck, executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute and a professor and chairman of the economics department at Suffolk University in Boston, argues that the preferential capital gains rates should be preserved.
