Policymakers have suggested a number of proposals to impose surtaxes on high-income taxpayers. Several of the proposals have focused on increasing taxes on long-term capital gains on those with an income above some threshold. However, many taxpayers can avoid a surtax by timing the realizations of their capital gains to keep their incomes below the threshold. In this brief we investigate how taxpayers respond if their income is consistently too high to avoid the surtax by using that tactic.