gaming event (either wait to realize at the lower rate or do so before it goes up) followed by a return to the status quo. I'd guess the vast majority of Americans have never paid CG taxes and most who have tend to be regular folks who sold real estate or some stocks at a point in time where they either felt it reached peak value or needed the cash without even knowing what the operative marginal tax rates were.

Long way of saying the tax rate for CG matters for a tiny subset of very wealthy professional investors and not much to anyone else. And even for those investors, they're still going to sell assets and offset gains with losses whether that's happening at 15% or 25%, and history shows longterm behavior doesn't change much based on rate changes.

Of course, the government isn't goign to get much by way of extra revenue by upping the CG rate either but that's a separate issue.