> lists all of the reasons why countries with taxes are nice to live in
> concludes by: "it would be perfect if not for taxes"
People wouldn't be as friendly and well educated if they went bankrupt when losing their jobs, getting a cancer, had to take $100k loans for uni, &c. the towns wouldn't be nice and clean if people didn't pay taxes for regular cleaning, ...
There are very very few countries with low taxes and nice quality of life for the average Joe, and the exceptions usually don't want you to move in. Try Albania or Bulgaria, you'll quickly understand why most people are mostly happy about paying taxes
I guess my complaint was more about the type of taxes rather than the concept of taxes in general. Income tax I can accept: it's the price of entry to live in the place and enjoy its benefits. Even then there's plenty of room for debate between the extremes of "ultra-low / no tax" and "very high", but let's set that aside for now.
But having a wealth tax with a very low threshold is something else entirely. It means that I'm not free to invest and grow the money that is already mine, that I already paid taxes on in the first place. It means I'll always be held back and prevented from advancing as much as I could. It means that improving your situation so that next year you're doing a little better than this year, is something that the system actively pushes you away from.
There are also practical problems with taxing wealth. Income tax is "easy": by definition you have the money to pay for it because it's charged on money that you've received. With a wealth tax, you might not have the money. For example, if you own an investment apartment or some other illiquid asset you can't just sell a piece of it every year to pay the tax. You'll either have to find the money out of income (assuming you have enough) or ruin your investment strategy by selling the whole thing when you didn't plan to.
It also distorts the risk/reward tradeoff: many investments might not make sense at all if you're suddenly paying 2% a year of the value.
If my math is correct, and it almost certainly isn't, if you had 100kEUR in savings, you would be taxed on "fictitious" returns on 42k. The fictitious rate of return they use is 1.44%, which brings your fictitious returns to 600EUR. You then owe income taxes on that return, which is 200EUR.
So your wealth tax on 100k is 0.2% or so...
Again, my math might have missed a zero somewhere.
> There are also practical problems with taxing wealth. [...] With a wealth tax, you might not have the money. For example, if you own an investment apartment or some other illiquid asset you can't just sell a piece of it every year to pay the tax.
This is a strawman trotted out against wealth taxes.
Stated another way: no, people shouldn't be able to put their wealth into an arbitrary form to make it untaxable.
After that, it's standard planning. Owe an unexpected amount of tax on a high performing asset you don't want to liquidate? Take a loan with it/gains as collateral. (The same as people do now!)
The bigger issue is valuation of illiquid assets. I.e. how to properly tax someone benefiting from opaque trusts or with shares of non-public assets (which they might be inclined to hide the profitability of).
"Take a loan with it" - that's not a practical solution if the asset is property. Getting a mortgage approved is far from straightforward, can take months, is by no means guaranteed to be accepted, and can be extremely expensive if done frequently (e.g. yearly) due to one-off costs and lock-in periods.
I'm not sure what country you live in, but in the US at least, mortgages (and their property-collateral loan relatives) are incredibly easy to get, relatively cheap, and come in a (perhaps overly so) incredible range of flavors.
Folks spend so much time talking about second+ order effects of immigration, but it's the economy that's primarily important.
I don't know too many nativists / nationalists who agree with the statement 'I am fine with my country being poorer and worse off economically in exchange for getting rid of immigrants.'
Their political champions bill is as though removing immigrant labor will somehow make the economy better.
Because, yes, when has a smaller, more expensive domestic labor pool ever helped a country's economic competitiveness? /s
Sure, but the parts you still enjoy wouldn't even exist otherwise. Even the crumbling western european healthcare system is miles ahead of the american one for the average citizen.
It's always been a ponzi scheme, even 20 years ago when you enjoyed it and thought everything was perfect.
> low skilled migrants that are not incentivized to work.
Including all the FIRE people and tech migrants who come to take freebies while not chipping in
> concludes by: "it would be perfect if not for taxes"
People wouldn't be as friendly and well educated if they went bankrupt when losing their jobs, getting a cancer, had to take $100k loans for uni, &c. the towns wouldn't be nice and clean if people didn't pay taxes for regular cleaning, ...
There are very very few countries with low taxes and nice quality of life for the average Joe, and the exceptions usually don't want you to move in. Try Albania or Bulgaria, you'll quickly understand why most people are mostly happy about paying taxes