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All working class people who are opposed to formuesskatt need to visit the United States, so they can experience the brutal reality of a nation without a wealth tax.
No other Scandinavian country has a wealth tax. In the EU, Spain is the only country that officially has a wealth tax. In Spain it only kicks in if your assets are worth more than 3 million Euro (around 35 million NOK). In Norway, you start paying a yearly 1% wealth tax on all your assets, once your net worth reaches 140k Euro.
I am working class. I make basically an average wage here in Norway and I am strongly opposed to the wealth tax in its current form. The retirement age is raised constantly. (It's been raised to 72 years starting next year for full benefits.) The publicly financed pension scheme is unsustainable, and already inadequate to live a decent life. If you're lucky, your employer has a good pension scheme. If you don't, you have to invest money yourself.
It is said that a sustainable withdrawal rate for retirement savings is around 3%. But if you live in Norway, capital gains are taxed at 40%. (The second highest rate in Europe.) Additionally you have to pay a wealth tax equivalent to 1% of all your assets every year. So you basically need to save twice as much as you would in most countries to achieve a sustainable withdrawal rate in retirement. This is not beneficial for the working class. It makes it more difficult to retire, and keeps the working class working.
They could increase the minimum deduction to 40 million NOK or something similar to what Spain does, and people could save for a decent retirement without incurring a wealth tax. Revenue wouldn't even be affected that much, because most of the revenue from the wealth tax comes from the top anyway. Not to mention that our neighboring Scandinavian countries can deliver very similar public services without any wealth tax at all.
Thanks for your insights. Personally, I'd prefer to pay a wealth tax like that compared to a system where it's up to the individual to save for their retirement.
A reasonable and nuanced take? Clearly, lemmy isn't a very good reddit replacement.
140k euro/164k usd is a 20% payment on a fairly average single family home in a lot of of North America, or living expenses for 4-6 years.
The exclusion should not penalize working class; a retirement fund shouldn’t be hit with a wealth tax!
The exclusion should be indexed to inflation.
I'm pretty sure that wealth taxes are uncommon globally; that is, not having one is going to be the norm. Not easy to enforce, and not all that many countries are going to be in a reasonable position to track assets sufficiently to do that enforcement.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax
As of 2017, five of the 36 OECD countries had a personal wealth tax (down from 12 in 1990).[2]
OECD countries have developed economies and are probably going to be in a better position to enforce a wealth tax than most countries. And yeah, they mention enforcement:
In 1990, about a dozen European countries had a wealth tax, but by 2019, all but three had eliminated the tax because of the difficulties and costs associated with both design and enforcement.[6][7]
There are some taxes that are sorta-kinda analogous, like estate tax. The US does have a federal estate tax and most US states also have estate taxes. And property taxes can act kinda like a wealth tax as well, as they're on the amount of assets held. The US doesn't have a federal property tax, but most US states do have a property tax.
They see it as the cornerstone of a progressive tax system that has helped to create one of Europe’s most equal societies.
Which is correct.
I've been waiting for "Scandinavian socialism" to be under more and more attack (by capitalist media and lobby, of course) for years. If the people are vulnerable to right-wing bullshit (which is most bullshit), then they'll destroy it. If not, it will survive. Most countries are vulnerable due to an educational system that fails to install critical thinking and the curiosity required to develop an understanding of the world (which makes bullshit stand out).
Cut through the noise, and the underlying conversation is nuanced. Norwegians discuss tax with confidence, because they have access to all the right data. Almost uniquely among democratic nations, the tax returns of named individuals are public, in a database that all citizens can access. Likewise, information on companies is detailed and reliable.
People also need the time to read it.
With a sovereign wealth fund that collects the profits from Norway’s abundant stocks of oil and gas able to contribute 25% of public spending each year, there is arguably no need for the formuesskatt.
Well... points at the climate.
Alstadsæter says the wealth tax is harder to dodge: “It’s the only tax that cannot be avoided through restructuring while living in Norway, hence the opposition.”
Nice. Everyone should have that!
Something tangential:
Is Inequality Inevitable? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
We find it noteworthy that the best-fitting model for empirical wealth distribution discovered so far is one that would be completely unstable without redistribution rather than one based on a supposed equilibrium of market forces. In fact, these mathematical models demonstrate that far from wealth trickling down to the poor, the natural inclination of wealth is to flow upward, so that the “natural” wealth distribution in a free-market economy is one of complete oligarchy. It is only redistribution that sets limits on inequality.
The mathematical models also call attention to the enormous extent to which wealth distribution is caused by symmetry breaking, chance and early advantage (from, for example, inheritance). And the presence of symmetry breaking puts paid to arguments for the justness of wealth inequality that appeal to “voluntariness”—the notion that individuals bear all responsibility for their economic outcomes simply because they enter into transactions voluntarily—or to the idea that wealth accumulation must be the result of cleverness and industriousness. It is true that an individual's location on the wealth spectrum correlates to some extent with such attributes, but the overall shape of that spectrum can be explained to better than 0.33 percent by a statistical model that completely ignores them. Luck plays a much more important role than it is usually accorded, so that the virtue commonly attributed to wealth in modern society—and, likewise, the stigma attributed to poverty—is completely unjustified.
Moreover, only a carefully designed mechanism for redistribution can compensate for the natural tendency of wealth to flow from the poor to the rich in a market economy. Redistribution is often confused with taxes, but the two concepts ought to be kept quite separate. Taxes flow from people to their governments to finance those governments' activities. Redistribution, in contrast, may be implemented by governments, but it is best thought of as a flow of wealth from people to people to compensate for the unfairness inherent in market economics. In a flat redistribution scheme, all those possessing wealth below the mean would receive net funds, whereas those above the mean would pay. And precisely because current levels of inequality are so extreme, far more people would receive than would pay.
These discussions would't be needed if money never had that much power over lives! Europe is not doing that much better than the imperialist US.
And the people have the power to change it it's that simple! But they rather choose to fight each other. While the elite has all the time to cause more unfixable problems to society. Which can never be fixed and turn societies even more dangerous and violent for everyone the in future.
That why i have sympathy for robbers thieves and straight illegal money scheme crimes in general because at least these people are "morally" honest!
I'm Also "proud" myself i have never paid that much income taxes. If i just can avoid it (yes i'm a jerk/asshole etc) for most eyes i agree that too! But at least i don't tell other people "what you must do while polishing my halo and holding a knife on other hand"