even more so of rich people who pay a lower tax rate than they do.

On carried interest, the argument is that the partner is investing their own capital so the gains should be treated as capital gains. I'm fine with that for the portion of the returns associated with their investment, but not for performance bonuses. Let's you have a $5 billion private equity fund and there is a 50% performance bonus for any returns over a benchmark (say the S&P 500). So if the fund returns 12% in a given year while the S&P returns 8%, the partners would get a $100 million performance bonus ($5 billion x (12% - 8%) *50%). Assume there are 5 partners, so they each get $20 million. They each also invested $5 million of their own money into the fund. I'm fine with the 12% of the return of the fund being treated as capital gains (so $600K), but the $20M for the overachievement. Ordinary income... full stop. Obviously this is a simplified example, but it's my understanding of how carried interest basically works. The proponents of carried interest treatment argue that a partner invested $5M and turned that into $25.6M, therefore the $20.6M of income is all capital gains. I argue the $600K underlying return is capital gains, and the $20M is compensation (albeit performance based compensation).