this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024

1100 points (94.7% liked)

Political Memes

5446 readers

3437 users here now

Welcome to politcal memes!

These are our rules:

Be civil

Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.

No misinformation

Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.

Posts should be memes

Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.

No bots, spam or self-promotion

Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1100

Billionaires should not exist. (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

89 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(page 2) 40 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 132 points 8 months ago (17 children)

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.

load more comments (16 replies)

[–] [email protected] 35 points 8 months ago

No billionaire in Germany pays 47% income tax haha

[–] [email protected] 65 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What's the image in the bottom left from?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

All the frames are from the movie "We're the Millers"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oh. Haha I've seen this image a lot but for some reason all the other panels looked familiar to me as part of some movie I'd seen but forgotten about and this one seemed like the odd one out. Turns out they're all from a movie I've ever heard of.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This scene is worth watching

The rest of it... I'm not so sure

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I watched the whole thing. No regerts

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Start the head tax

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

blegh who needs free healthcare, education, worker's rights, and social services. i enjoy living check to check like 60% of Americans

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This means Swedish billionaires work harder than any other billionaires in the world to maintain their status as a billionaire. American billionaires are lazy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What a country. In Sweden they tax the billionaires. In America, billionaires tax you!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

When it comes to statistics like Gini on wealth inequality, Sweden is worse than the US.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Didn't know Jennifer Aniston was from the Netherlands...

[–] [email protected] 162 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

...and misleading for Sweden. Our capital gains tax is 30%.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Taxing expected return sounds a bit absurd. What if the capital turns out to be lost, does the state give the tax back?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

Greed should be punished, pro-social vocations rewarded.

Greed is a an antisocial force more effective in its destruction than even hatred.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Omg, like a tax refund? Gimme a break. Fuck the rich with a tire iron.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The idea is that if such a tax existed the social security wouldn't suck

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Does that bring in a significant amount of revenue?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

If you're taxing unrealized gains, then that would be a very significant revenue source.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

And somehow there are still lots of loopholes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Exactly. Thanks to those loopholes, The Netherlands is a tax haven, one of the worst on Earth even. Mind you, the government has decreed that it is not so it must be all good eh?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

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?

load more comments