As I understand it, capital gains tax is applied just to the difference in price between acquisition and disposition of an asset. I picked gold for my example because it’s static, and the closest thing to neutral—compared to a business or even a productive asset like farmland.

If your business earns more money over time, I don’t think that’s a capital gain, strictly speaking, but rather profit. There are taxes on profit as well, but those are distinct from capital gains taxes, AFAIK.

I’m not an accountant nor lawyer, so this is just my lay interpretation, and I could be overturned by an expert in such matters.

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That’s a good point, business profit ≠ capital gains. The business profit, I would define as retained earnings or free cash flow (net income can be heavily manipulated), which should be deployed/reinvested to earn more retained earnings/FCF.

A good capital allocator will work to grow the business and reduce corporate taxes. I mistakingly mixed this up with capital gains tax, sorry about that.

I think the bottom line is monetary debasement = inflation = no bueno.

The cheat code is save in assets which beat your inflation rate (not CPI). With insurance, food, utilities, etc going up north of 10% year over year, only a few assets I can think of can help… care to take a guess? lol