Man this article has created all sorts of strange discussions. I've watched in on G+, Facebook and now here, and eventually they get soooo derailed talking about odd ball stuff not really related. I guess this means Mr. Christensen is onto something stirring up this much discussion.
One thing is common among all of the discussions which is the fixation on the tax proposal, but I think it was just a swag at what a policy might look like. I thought the real interesting part of his observation is that we are rewarding efficiency innovation too much and transformative innovation almost nothing. Try and develop a new power system not based on fossil fuels and see how much money people want to give you when your time horizon is 10-20 years out. It is the transformative innovation that recreates jobs for the jobs lost through efficiency innovation. I think that is the more important discussion over a regressive capital gain tax. Remember, most entrepreneurship would qualify for preferential capital gains taxation (except for ISO options oddly) because even the efficiency innovation takes more than 1 year to payback.
His tax would mostly affect wall street and the trader mentality: HFT, ETFs, day traders, etc. Remember people buying or selling securities don't actually give companies money directly. Companies only get more money when the issue more shares (or hold their own shares). If I buy a share for 1 day or 10 years the company doesn't benefit at all from my action.
If you look at the green energy movement a few years back was going to be very transformative, but VCs backed off when it was hard to turn a profit as quickly as information technology. It's that kinda of calculus that needs changing if we really want to do what Christensen is outlining.
One thing is common among all of the discussions which is the fixation on the tax proposal, but I think it was just a swag at what a policy might look like. I thought the real interesting part of his observation is that we are rewarding efficiency innovation too much and transformative innovation almost nothing. Try and develop a new power system not based on fossil fuels and see how much money people want to give you when your time horizon is 10-20 years out. It is the transformative innovation that recreates jobs for the jobs lost through efficiency innovation. I think that is the more important discussion over a regressive capital gain tax. Remember, most entrepreneurship would qualify for preferential capital gains taxation (except for ISO options oddly) because even the efficiency innovation takes more than 1 year to payback.
His tax would mostly affect wall street and the trader mentality: HFT, ETFs, day traders, etc. Remember people buying or selling securities don't actually give companies money directly. Companies only get more money when the issue more shares (or hold their own shares). If I buy a share for 1 day or 10 years the company doesn't benefit at all from my action.
If you look at the green energy movement a few years back was going to be very transformative, but VCs backed off when it was hard to turn a profit as quickly as information technology. It's that kinda of calculus that needs changing if we really want to do what Christensen is outlining.