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- cross-posted to:
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This is misleading. The 49.5% tax in the Netherlands is on income above €75,518. Billionaires rarely make the bulk of their money as income.
We don’t have a capital gains tax, instead there is a tax on capital that’s based on expected return on that capital. It’s about 1% on money in bank account and about 6% on stock and other investments.
Same for Germany. It’s income taxes (everything above ~66k/year is 42% taxes and everything above ~277k/year is 45%) no capital gains taxes (they are 25% no matter the amount of capital gains) or asset taxes. Don’t know where the 47% are coming from.
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Also misleading, the US gives trillions of tax dollars to the wealthy who are paying nothing. Usually it is in corporate welfare, but a couple years ago they were paid directly.
…and misleading for Sweden. Our capital gains tax is 30%.
Does that bring in a significant amount of revenue?
If you’re taxing unrealized gains, then that would be a very significant revenue source.
The expected return part is the main tax on billionaires. With capital gain you can hold on forever and never get taxed, and if you die you completely skip capital gains tax with inheritance. Effective tax rate is near zero. This trick obviously only works for people who don’t need their invested money, buy and never ever sell.
Compare that to NL’s tax. Invested? You pay 6.17% x 32% = 1.97% on your investment account, immediately, no deferral possible, year after year. And the rate went up to 36% in 2024 to reduce passive income’s rate advantage over income from work.
Would that mean that if something was not continually growing in value you’d end up paying the value of it in taxes over some amount of years? Does this encourage people to pay the tax value out of the asset or just divest from non appreciating assets? If you paid taxes from the value of the asset I guess it’d be like a series converging to zero over time? Like 6% of 100 is 6, the 6% of 94 is 5.64, 6% of 88.36, vs. paying 6 bucks every year. Slower but sort of an eroding effect - like paying society’s subscription fee for how you got the value in the first place!
It’s almost as if people are making up lies.
Taxing expected return sounds a bit absurd. What if the capital turns out to be lost, does the state give the tax back?
Greed should be punished, pro-social vocations rewarded.
Greed is a an antisocial force more effective in its destruction than even hatred.
In practice it means that the rich pay very little tax. It’s been an ongoing debate for years, and changes are being worked on to tax actual gains.
Omg, like a tax refund? Gimme a break. Fuck the rich with a tire iron.
Dude, I have much of my savings for retirement invested in stocks (ETF’s, it’s a fairly safe investment) since the social security in my country kinda sucks. My return on investment is 5% a year. Having a 6% tax actually means I lose money
It’s not 6% tax, the expected returns for investments are 6% and those are taxed at 36%. The first €57k (or €114k with partner) are tax free. So if you have €1M invested and have a partner, they expect you to make €60k and let you pay €20k.
You can invest in a retirement fund (managed by you, if you like) tax free from your gross salary (up to a limit). You’ll pay income taxes over your pay outs when you retire. The conditions are that you can only use it for your retirement.
The idea is that if such a tax existed the social security wouldn’t suck
That’s a very delusional idea.
The NL system which has been working for a while works by saying:
We don’t care about your capital gains, you’d just try to game the system, we’ll pretend you invest everything into a relatively safe bond scheme, and tax your capital income based on that. Meaning we tax wealth as if it was guaranteed income at 4% interest per year. If you gamble and lose, tough break, you still owe the same taxes, as you are bearing the risk on investments, not us.
Most state bonds are quite a bit lower than 4%, and even business bonds (I take bonds in some football clubs as a reference, because they tend to do quite prominent ads on them) only do 5-6%.
I just checked, the current assumed income on investments and assets in general is 6.17%. You pay a 35% tax on that income, so in effect a ~2% wealth tax per year.
Wow, this is just entirely wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.
Sweden has a maximum of around 55% income tax bracket if you’re in a municipality with high income tax, but billionaires never are and as such would be taxed probably at most 50% income tax bracket.
This is of course entirely irrelevant because billionaires don’t make their money on income. Sweden has fairly low capital gains taxes - 30% on regular accounts, and a special account that taxes the whole account value by a low percentage, which shakes out in average years to even lower taxes on capital. This assumes you even keep your capital in the country, which is a big if.
There’s also no inheritance tax, no gift tax and no property tax. Sweden is actually an unusually good place to be a billionaire as far as taxation goes, and a below average place to earn a high salary as far as taxation goes.
Thanks for the info. Good to know.
Sweden has fairly low capital gains taxes - 30% on regular accounts,
That’s twice the American rate.
Thanks to fairly recent changes by guess who!
Wait, The Guess Who are in politics now?!
/Old man joke
I think it caps at 20% doesn’t it?
I think 28% for short term gains, but a meager 15% for long term gains.
Afaik it’s 57%,or at least that’s what they’re taking of my bonus.
57% is the tax on “one-time gains” - bonuses and other such things.
This means that you’re probably overpaying on it, but you might also be underpaying on your income taxes (usually ~30% even if you reach the ~50%-tax bracket). Worst case scenario, you’ve lent some money interest-free to the government that you get back on your tax returns.
You can borrow from someone else. When someone else borrows from you, you lend it. Or lent as the past tense
Thanks, updated. I think my mistake stems from Swedish only having one word for the concept, regardless of the direction of the transaction.
I’ve noticed a lot of my european friends doing the same
I think the only english-speaking people in North America who know this read Hamlet in high school.
Are people not reading Hamlet in high school now? What was the cutoff for 16th century literature, 2021?
Ish…
They could have said “you have let the government borrow from you tax free.”
But yeah, the general idea holds.
My only question is: Is there a limit to one person’s power?
Dude… its a meme…
Correct, but there are those that would take this as a source of truth and run with it. It’s not the smart thing to do, but we already see people doing this sort of behavior on other social media.
We shouldn’t enable the problem, even if it’s an innocent mistake
You are correct one should never use a tactic that clearly worked for the opponent
The point of the meme is to highlight that rich people should be taxed more
You can’t include bracket taxing, asset taxing etc in a commit meme format.
If people get their facts off memes, they indeed have a problem but you can’t accommodate for all who arent critical of their knowledge sources
I don’t buy this argument - if you’re going to claim something to be the case, it should at least vaguely resemble the truth. Going by the ‘rules’ of this meme, Sweden should be right next to the U.S, or even take the U.S’ place given that the U.S ranks better on wealth equality (not income equality where Sweden ranks better).
We should absolutely tax billionaires more. We should make memes about it to spread the word. We should also make those memes at least kind of accurate.
To understand one significant downside of this - Swedes reading this meme might think that we don’t have a billionaire-taxation problem in our country. That’s actively harmful to the cause.
Just because it’s wrong, doesn’t make it a joke.
It’s was just a prank bro calm down
Memes is how we got Trumpers.
Billionaires in Europe “evade” taxes just like every other billionaire. Most of their wealth is assets, which is why their tax rates don’t seem right if you don’t understand how economics works.
You still pay tax of assets though…
Hahahahaha you’re funny
In the NL you do, there is a wealth tax. IDK how effective it is, but at least they are trying.
It’s effective in getting momey from the wealthier middle class. Like most of the tax related ruling and laws.
I think what limits its effectiveness is mostly that it’s only the NL doing it. If it was EU wide, or even US-wide, the world would change a lot.
Even if it’s not perfect now, I see that it is good that this tax exists for two reasons:
- At least it’s not taxing wages or consumption, which affect everyone but billionaires.
- It serves as a model for going in that direction, so neolibs can’t easily say there is no way to tax assets, or that taxing assets would crash the economy.
The property tax rate where I’m at is 1.7%, and the appraisal districts WAY undervalue properties. A house will sell for 5 million in the city where I work, and their value on the tax roll is $300,000.
As others have pointed out, this is pretty disingenuous. Some (all?) of the others are quoting marginal tax rates — and the US stacks up nicely on this front, at least in progressive states: max federal marginal tax rate is 37%, with California having a 14.4% max marginal rate. So apples to apples, the US would be 51.4%.
The problem, obviously, is that nowhere in the world do billionaires make their money through “normal” income.
Wrong.
Those are income taxes for people with high salaries.No billionaire earns the bulk of their money as taxable income. None of these countries tax billionaires the way the meme implies
No billionaire in Germany pays 47% income tax haha
Meanwhile in Hungary: if you’re a large business, you pay less tax by percentage than small businesses and self-employed people.
Isn’t Hungary officially the most corrupt country in Europe?
I think #1 in the EU and some strong place somewhere in the top 5 in Europe. It’s gotten SO much worse in the past 10-15 years… And not like it was good before that, to begin with.
Oh yeah, I’m aware - I had plans to move to Hungary, to get to know my ancestors’ homeland. Completely scrapped it and won’t even think about visiting until Orbán’s head in on a pike and his whole party of cronies is exiled.
UK:
“We hide your billionaires money”
Oh we do that in the US too. Turns out Idaho is a popular global tax haven
What a country. In Sweden they tax the billionaires. In America, billionaires tax you!
The 55% rate is only on wage income (and the real upper tax rate on wages is more like 66% anyway, if you include payroll tax).
Capital gains tax is 30%, and that’s only on realized gains AFAIK - which is shockingly close to the base payroll tax (25%).
The hardest taxed people here are the middle class, since they get their income as wages, whilst upper class tax rates are significantly lower, with more of their income being from capital gains.
We’ve been giving ours billions more dollars that we took from the plebs so they’ll be nice to us
No they’ve never been nice to us, why do you ask?
blegh who needs free healthcare, education, worker’s rights, and social services. i enjoy living check to check like 60% of Americans
I’m personally in favor of land value taxes, externality taxes, and natural resource severance taxes.
Just take everything from the neck up.
For billionaires: there is nothing there.
This means Swedish billionaires work harder than any other billionaires in the world to maintain their status as a billionaire. American billionaires are lazy.
No they don’t. They have their special loopholes to evade taxes. Nothing is as black and white. Have a look at Spotify, their profit and how many people they fired.
We have a point where progressive taxation reverses and you get a refund
