Fama & French on Simplifying Tax Treatment of Exchange-Traded Funds

Interesting op-ed in the Weekend Wall Street Journal:   Keep It Simple, by Eugene F. Fama (University of Chicago) & Kenneth R. French (Dartmouth, Tuck School of Business):

We suggest a simplification of the tax code that levels the playing field for [exchange-traded funds] and ordinary funds. Taxation of distributed dividends continues. (It hits the shareholders of ETFs and ordinary funds in the same way.) But taxation of capital gains occurs only when fund shareholders redeem their shares. In other words, we suggest that mutual fund capital gains should be taxed in the same way as gains on other securities.