So far most of the tax proposals floated have been government taking in less or giving out money so others will spend it. One can imagine taxing companies who don't spend money. Some number of companies are cutting expenses often by means of layoffs in order to preserve profits. But those profits are often not spent, making the capital gains tax a very inefficient way of helping the economy. It's probably politically impossible at this point to speed the sunsetting of the capital gains taxes which are scheduled to sunset at the end of 2011. And inefficient as it is it may not even be a good idea to cut it in the current environment. However one could imagine changing it so that for some companies that behaved in certain ways it would expire in say 2012 and for other it would expire earlier say 2010. Properly formulated this would be revenue neutral. Not all spending companies take grow the economy equally. Consider a company which increases it's stock price by buying back stock. That doesn't do much for the economy except to put more money into the hands of stockholders who as the above article points out don't spend the money quickly. In fact it's a disinvestment plan. There's no reason the government should be rewarding disinvestment. Capital gains incentives should go to companies that are actively growing. One good measure of growth would be that the aggregate size of the payroll, or perhaps the size of the payroll for the 80% lowest paid workers is growing or at least stable. Stretching out capital gains for companies who's payroll grows from what it was in 2008 to the point that stock was sold would be a powerful incentive for stockholders to encourage management towards longer term organic growth. Has anyone looked at stretching out or shrinking the window for the stronger capital gains rate to incent companies that do not shrink their payroll? Alternatively what other taxes that have a small multiplier could be used to incent behavior?