Should Capital Gains Be Taxed?

Paul Ryan has advocated ending them, but Chye-Ching Huang sees little reason to cut capital gains taxes further:

Proponents claim that lower capital gains and dividends rates help boost the economy, but the evidence doesn’t show it. In 2003, President Bush and Congress cut the tax rate on capital gains and dividends to 15 percent (ceasing to tax dividends at the same rate as salary and wage income). If the proponents were right, we would have expected U.S. stocks to then perform much better relative to European stocks, whose owners didn’t get such a tax cut. But research found that they didn’t.