July 18, 2016
See, it’s all very simple. If a father pays his kid $10 to mow his lawn, no one expects the kid to pay Social Security taxes on the money. It’s the exact same thing when people work 40 hours a week for an employer, why would we expect them to pay Social Security taxes on their wages?
That is the nature of the argument Steven B. Klinsky, the founder and chief executive officer of the private equity firm New Mountain Capital, gave in a NYT column in defense of the carried interest deduction. This deduction allows hedge fund and private equity fund mangers to pay taxes at the capital gains tax rate (20 percent) instead of the 39.6 percent tax rate they would pay on normal income.
Klinsky argues that this carried interest loophole really is no loophole at all:
“Let’s say a father and a son go into business together to buy the local lawn mowing company for $1,000. The father puts up the money and the son does all the work of having the idea, managing the partnership and so on. They agree to split the partnership’s future profit 80 percent for the father (as the passive, money limited partner) and 20 percent for the son (as the active, hands-on general partner). If years later, the partnership is sold for a profit, there would be long-term capital gain on that profit. The father would own 80 percent of the profit and pay 80 percent of the capital gains taxes. The son would own 20 percent of the profit and pay 20 percent of the capital gains taxes.”
See, when folks like Mitt Romney and Peter Peterson get hundreds of millions of dollars a year from their earnings as private equity fund managers it’s just the same as kid who goes into business with his father. There’s no reason these people should be taxed like ordinary workers.
As a practical matter, the relevant examples here are realtors, car salespeople, and other workers who get paid on a commission. In all these cases, workers’ pay depends on the profit to the owner of the business or the customer. In all of these cases, workers are taxed on their commissions in exactly the same way that other workers are taxed on salaries. This is really not a tough call. There is no reason for the I.R.S. to give workers a tax break just because they are paid on commission.
Apparently, Klinsky thinks that the rules that apply to ordinary workers shouldn’t apply to the very rich people who run private equity and hedge funds. At least, that is the only thing that we can reasonably infer from his argument.
Of course, the son in his case should, in principle, have to pay normal taxes on the earnings from his labor just as the kid mowing his dad’s lawn should in principle pay Social Security tax on his $10. However, because trivial sums are involved and the enforcement issue would be extremely difficult, we don’t worry about these cases. When some of the richest people in the country can get away with paying a lower tax rate than a school teacher or firefighter, it is something worth worrying about.
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