rosen@gypsy.UUCP (09/04/86)
Question concerning capital gains and losses: I understand from the new tax laws that there will be no distinction made between a long term and a short term capital gain. All capital gains, regardless of how long held, will be taxed at whatever your normal income tax rate is. Currently, the inverse is true of capital losses with a short term loss being fully deductable and a long term loss being only partly deductable. With this reasoning, it is reasonable to expect that a lot of people will sell off stock come the end of the year in order to realize the advantage of a long term capital gain which would otherwise revert to a short term capital gain (effectively) after the first of the year. In other words, they'll choose to pay a smaller amount of tax this year as a short term capital gain rather than wait to next year when they would owe more tax on the same sale of stock. My question is this: "What changes will be made with respect to long and short term capital losses?" I would like to think that there would be no distinction between long and short term capital losses and that every loss will be fully deductable (how nice!). That means if I own a stock that would currently provided me with a long term loss (being only partly deductable), and I am thinking about selling the stock and taking the loss now, I would actually be better off waiting until next year to sell this stock and then I could take it as a short term loss (effectively) since it will now be fully deductable under the new tax bill. What I want to know is just how fair (huh, yea right!) and consistant the new bill will be with respect to capital gains and losses. Assume that the stock price remains constant in both the gain and loss examples above during the transition period. Is this a reasonable rationale for capital losses? I would expect this is not the case for capital losses since in actuallity this provides a deduction that didn't exist under the old tax bill which is something that the new tax bill is intended to prevent. Anybody have any thoughts on this or know of hard facts concerning capital losses that are in the current tax bill? ---------------- | Steve Rosen | Siemens Research and Technology Laboratories | Princeton, NJ USENET: adrvax\ ihnp4 | princeton |-->!siemens!gypsy!rosen topaz | vrdxhq/ ARPA: siemens!gypsy!rosen@topaz.rutgers.edu