Frank’s TingThe #entitled “Founders" are outing themselves on LinkedIn again
Nobody starts a business because of the CGT discount. Nobody. I run one. I know dozens of people who run one. Not one of us pulled up a spreadsheet of Treasury concessions before quitting our day… | Dr Marco Motta | 251 comments
Nobody starts a business because of the CGT discount. Nobody. I run one. I know dozens of people who run one. Not one of us pulled up a spreadsheet of Treasury concessions before quitting our day jobs. And yet, according to this week's commentary, Australia's founders will be utterly devastated by a marginal change to capital gains tax. The barbarians are at the gates. The animal spirits are spooked. Send help. Or, alternatively, this is nonsense. You start a business because a wage pays for your time, and time is finite. Your income caps the second your calendar is full. A business is a multiplier: you earn from other people's work, or from one idea that outscales your own hours. That's the incentive. A tax sweetener is a footnote written in pencil. Investors are in the same boat, and they know it. Money doesn't get "put to work" out of civic virtue. It gets put to work because cash sitting still is eaten alive by inflation. The system doesn't reward investing. It punishes not investing. Subtle difference. Important one. And here's the part everyone is being remarkably coy about: in an inflationary world, owning the means of production beats selling your labour. Always. That's not ideology, that's a calculator. It's also why a vanishingly small number of people own most of the wealth, while everyone else rents out their week in 40-hour blocks and calls it a career. Labor's CGT changes aren't an attack on enterprise. They're a slightly panicked attempt to keep wage earners alive in a game that stopped working for them around 1985. And honestly, I want a world where my kids don't have to start a business if they don't want to, and still can afford a house and a family and feel like their future is not a constant bet. So by all means, argue the policy. Argue the design. Argue the timing. But spare us the pantomime that founders will down tools over a tax bracket. We were never doing it for the discount. And honestly, anyone who was should probably go back to their safe bean counting job. | 251 comments on LinkedIn
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