personally, I think this whole 'tax capital gains at a lower rate than income' pushes people to build businesses to dump, rather than building them to run. I think we'd all be a lot better off if the eliminated the double taxation on dividends (by making them pre-tax for the corporation) then just taxing all individual income as income.
Granted... that's just pandering to my own interests here, having built a company to run, not to sell. (I chose an industry where the standard price to sell is, well, silly low.) If you sell an ISP, I am told, the going rate is a year's revenue plus the value of your equipment. Considering that I'm doubling every six months or so, that just seems silly, and I suspect that lower price is in part because i'd pay half as much taxes if I sell the company all at once than if I keep it long enough to pay myself that much in salary.
still, I think capital gains being lower than salary taxes encourages short-term thinking, and gives publicly traded companies an unfair advantage over the rest of us.
Granted... that's just pandering to my own interests here, having built a company to run, not to sell. (I chose an industry where the standard price to sell is, well, silly low.) If you sell an ISP, I am told, the going rate is a year's revenue plus the value of your equipment. Considering that I'm doubling every six months or so, that just seems silly, and I suspect that lower price is in part because i'd pay half as much taxes if I sell the company all at once than if I keep it long enough to pay myself that much in salary.
still, I think capital gains being lower than salary taxes encourages short-term thinking, and gives publicly traded companies an unfair advantage over the rest of us.