In 1999 the Ralph Committee recommended sweeping reforms to the Australian income tax system. Its final report, consisted of eight parts and made 280 recommendations. Many of these have since passed into law in a staggered series of stages since 1999. Numerous CGT-related recommendations were...

New Zealand currently charges some classes of capital gains to income tax, but there is no tax on capital gains as such. The Tax Working Group recently established by the government has however recommended that there should be such a tax. That is, it has recommended that New Zealand should, like...

Exempting capital gains from taxation clearly favours large established business at the expense of new and small business, and promotes an increasing concentration of wealth at the expense of low and middle income taxpayers . The business submissions to the Government’s Tax Review 2001 though...

This article reviews the case for taxing capital gains in New Zealand. The analogy is drawn between a taxation system and a medieval toll bridge. The wider the span of the bridge the more traffic can pass in the same time period. This can allow a reduction in the rate of toll, reducing the...

The current capital gains tax law stipulates that the tax rate for short-term investment (gains and losses) and long-term losses is equal to an investor's marginal ordinary income tax rate, which implies that this rate for low income investors can be significantly lower than that for high income...

All tax theorists recognize that capital gains taxes ought to apply only to real gains; that is, those that are adjusted for inflation. This has never been the case in American history. As a consequence, a considerable portion of inflationary gains have been taxed as if they are real, according...

For many years, conservatives have asserted that the Treasury Department has the authority to index capital gains for inflation without legislation. It could simply redefine the term "cost" for calculating basis to mean inflation-adjusted cost, they say. This paper reviews the history of this...

Debate over the U.S. federal estate tax has intensified recently as a result of the sunset provisions in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA) of 2001 and changes in law passed in conjunction with the "fiscal cliff" at the end of 2012. Despite recent changes in the law,...

We consider the Merton problem with capital gain taxes. Since closed-form solutions are generally unavailable, we provide asymptotic expansions with small interest rate and other parameters, and then obtain an explicit investment and consumption strategy that effectively approximates the optimal...

Despite the importance of a source rule for capital gains from stock sales in the international tax context, there is no generally accepted approach to allocating the right to tax such income between source countries and resident countries properly. A historical study helps elucidate the basis...