Confirm features of investment income

[MaxGhenis]

Currently, all investment income is being taxed as capital gains. Is that improperly taxing interest and dividends?

[nikhilwoodruff]

It's not completely clear, and the documentation for the Family Resources Survey says to treat the investment income field with high caution. There's also some nuance missing at the moment in both interest tax and dividends tax in that they both work structurally similarly to Capital Gains Tax (using income tax bands but not rates) but with slightly different rates - I'm not sure at the moment how to distinguish between these types in the FRS.

[nikhilwoodruff]

Interest and dividends rules were implemented in #37 , so closing.

[MaxGhenis]

Does this pertain to interest as well as dividends? https://github.com/nikhilwoodruff/openfisca-uk/blob/master/openfisca_uk/parameters/taxes/income_tax/rates/dividend_rates.yaml

How about capital gains?

[nikhilwoodruff]

Dividends are taxed slightly differently to interest: https://github.com/nikhilwoodruff/openfisca-uk/blob/cefe0b8ffbb6ac09b57e59653c74517557969ca9/openfisca_uk/variables/person/taxes/income_tax.py#L212, and savings interest is taxed along with other interest. They also have different allowances and deductions. As for capital gains - should've mentioned, but after implementing the specific rules for interest and dividends I don't think we're actually handling it at all, as we don't have any other data for it (no other models account for it either I think)

[MaxGhenis]

I see, from that code it looks like interest is taxed closer to ordinary income than to dividends, is that right?

Filed #40 for capital gains implementation, which would be low priority since there's no data (and it's not a major source of revenue, and it's especially elastic to tax changes).

[MaxGhenis]

@nikhilwoodruff if we're good on investment income other than capital gains, feel free to close this.