data<\/a> \u2013 the top 10% of income earners received 83% of the benefit of the capital gains tax concession and 37% of negative gearing. The vast majority of the benefit of both went to people earning above the then median income of $58,216.<\/p>\n Illustration: Guardian Design<\/p>\n
Capital gains taxes are the tax paid on the profits (the \u201cgains\u201d) when you sell an asset \u2013 like a house \u2013 for a profit. Under changes introduced in 1999, investors get a 50% discount in capital gains tax if they hold on to the asset for more than a year.<\/p>\n
Negative gearing (what the Treasury calls \u201crental loss\u201d) is when an investment property makes a loss \u2013 like if the rental income doesn\u2019t pay the mortgage \u2013 and the losses are tax deductible against a landlord\u2019s income.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of both tax benefits went to those who earn above the median income.<\/p>\n
Of the more than 1 million tax filers in 2022-23 that saw a net capital gain, just 71% actually benefited from the capital gains tax discount. Almost all of this \u2013 95% \u2013 went to Australians earning above the median income.<\/p>\n
But even among the better off, there is a huge inequality \u2013 more than half of the capital gains tax benefit went to the top 1% of income earners.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This year\u2019s federal budget includes changes to negative gearing and capital gains (CGT) and discretionary trust tax concessions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":668028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-668027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/668028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}