There’s an article in the Tagi about who will or will not be affected. I don’t have an abo though 
Got my letter today. No to 99%, yes to marriage for all. Happy that it’s so obvious how it will turn out.
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What I don’t understand about this 99% initiative is what is meant about taxing capital gains…?
Right now the taxation on capital gains from stocks is 0%, they want to tax it 150% over 100k, but they seem to assume that it should also be taxed 100% under 100k. That kinda follows, and it is not something I am willing to accept right now, even if I can realize my profit tomorrow and avoid any taxes on my existing gains… Anybody understood this?
It is just a little too unclear.
The proposition is really unclear, but it does not cover what we know (on this forum) as capital gains. They use the term capital gains for the gains coming from capital: collecting rent from real estate, getting dividends from stocks, …
Very good, then I will vote yes!
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This 4min video could help Votation populaire du 26 septembre 2021
It’s a good summary of the initiative.
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Same here…:
99% == NO
Marriage == YES
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“Dearest Mabel
I had it all planned out. I have my own piece of land in the south, where I grow cotton and use slaves to pick it, now that damn Lincoln went and freed them! I had a plan! I would use the gains from selling cotton and would sell 4% of my slaves every year! Now I have to free them!”
I’m sorry Bojack. As much as I sympathize with someone who lived what I’m sure is a decent life (no matter how economically advantaged), I do not agree. This is a piece of legislation that impacts YOU negatively. That’s why it’s motivated by “jealousy”, “envy”, “laziness”. That’s what happens, legislation changes, you have a voice, the fellow on unemployment gets a voice, and the single mom scrapping by gets a vote.
I’m sure there have been advantaged aristocrats in what is now Poland (I seem to remember you being from there) who have lamented circumstances changing when the communists took over and the same happend when the USSR fell.
No offense meant. It just bugs me. Everybody is progressive until it hurts them. Same rights for me, but not for thee.
EDIT: Before I get brigaded. I know making money of the market is not the same technically as it’s making money off of slaves, I’m just using hyperbole to make a point. Circumstances change, we have to deal with. At least be glad that you don’t lose capital gains by a civil war like Mabel’s buddy up there. You get a voice to say you’re against it without taking up a gun.
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I once had a discussion with somebody who said that it is “immoral that there are rich people.” Yet morals and moralism are often confused. And if somebody wants to be moral with their own wallet in mind, it’s often moralism, not morals.
Based on what?
Can seriously not understand what trend you are observing, at least for Switzerland.
Is that “culture” more prevalent in 2020 than 2005, maybe?
Is it more prevalent in 2020 than 1970, probably not.
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That’s why democracy is not a system where everybody gets a fair treatment, but where over 50% of public opinion is in agreement on any subject.
Well, let’s think for a moment what is capital, and how fair it is to have it, use it, and be taxed for it. I recently heard one Mr E. M. say that capital is distilled labor. What does it mean? It means that in order to have something, you have to make it first. Everything can be made, it just requires labor. This is a simple notion, yet I didn’t look at it this way, but it makes total sense.
Let’s consider an example of making chairs. If you make a simple chair for your private use, I think it’s fair to assume that you should have ownership right to that chair and that you shouldn’t have to pay taxes for making that chair. Agreed? Otherwise, you might tax people for cooking themselves a meal or a mother for taking care of her child.
But then let’s consider you made a couple of chairs, and your neighbor made a couple of tables. And you want to barter with him. Why should this event of ownership change be taxable?
And chairs are easier to make with skills and tools, which is capital. You can learn to improve your chair-making skills and you can make tools, which you will keep and they will help you work more efficiently. Again, you accumulated all that capital through your own work. Why should this be taxed?
Moreover, if you levy tax on selling a chair, and then you levy it again when the chairmaker sells his business because of retirement, how many times do you want to tax the same thing?
Your comparisons are ludicrous and ignorant. You have no idea what you are talking about. This is not a way to argue in a civilized society.
Like you partner dies or leaves you?
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I think we already went over it: your life outcome does not solely depend on your decisions. But we seem to disagree at an even different level: I believe we should help the needy to have a reasonable standard of life even if they are the ones to blame for their demise, like anti-vaxxers who catch covid and end up needing the ICU…
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Almost all of these initatives were heavily defeated?
Historically there were many similair initiatives:
Eidgenössische Volksinitiative ‘für einkommens- und vermögensabhängige Krankenkassenprämien’ (admin.ch) (Initiative to make health care costs dependent on income from 1998.)
Eidgenössische Volksinitiative ‘Ja zu fairen Mieten’ (admin.ch) (2003 trying to heavily restrict rental rates.)
Eidgenössische Volksinitiative ‘für eine Verlängerung der bezahlten Ferien’ (admin.ch) (1985 trying to increase paid leave.)
Eidgenössische Volksinitiative ‘für einen wirksamen Schutz der Mutterschaft’ (admin.ch) (Stronger protection of motherhood from 1984.)
Eidgenössische Volksinitiative ‘Sichere Arbeitsplätze für alle’ (admin.ch) (Abolish unemployment from 1980.)
Funny enough a similair initiative already happened in 1946 ( Eidgenössische Volksinitiative ‘Recht auf Arbeit’ (admin.ch)) and in 1894 ( Eidgenössische Volksinitiative ‘Gewährleistung des Rechts auf Arbeit’ (admin.ch)).
Yes, one of the first initatives ever in switzerland saw swiss people as entitled to a job. I don’t think that such a proposition would even fly today.
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I’d say it depends, if the wood for this chair comes from your neighbor’s forest, then you’d either owe them part of the rights to that chair, or buy/trade them first. If it comes from some piece of land cared for by the community (or property of the community), then these rights would be owed to the community. They used to have chores days where people would give their time and energy to make sure the common land keeps flourishing, I guess we could say that nowadays, we pay for it through taxes rather than sweat and time.
Because your neighbor and yourself enjoy some sort of security allowing for this barter to occur without the chairs and/or tables being stolen/destroyed right after, and that you may have used a road between your houses that was paid for and is maintained by the community and makes transporting goods from their house to yours less of a hassle. The general idea is that living in society brings benefits and they have to be paid for in some way. Taxing capital is but one of them, which also aims to ensure that capital is put to use rather than stored away.
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I tried hard to come up with a simple example to prevent such counter-arguments. You can make a deal with the owner of the wood that he gives you enough wood for 2 chairs and he gets 1 chair as payment. Makes sense? I just want to present a picture in which you start with no capital at all (other than two healthy eyes, hands & legs), and gather it through work.
Yes, in serfdom, if you owned land as a serf, you had to work e.g. 1-2 days a week for your lord. I think, in order to answer who has the right to own land, you have to go way back when this land was first claimed. Then it was fought for. There definitely should be some kind of payment for protecting your possessions (land & other capital) through army, police, courts. But I would see it as a proportion of the value of said capital, and not as a proportion of the income that this capital happens to generate.
Agreed. I just think: either tax capital or labor. Not both, because then you’re taxing the same thing twice. Or to put it differently: my ideal tax system would be simple, fair and hard to cheat. That’s why I don’t like progressive taxes, they’re not fair and you can’t levy them at source.
You think it would need to be so high? Any tax, that you introduce, has a discouraging effect towards the subject of taxation. High income taxes = people don’t want to work. High capital taxes = people are discouraged to accumulate capital. The question is, which is worse.
I think high+progressive income tax has this effect.
People who earn little already pay low taxes. The biggest effect would be for high earners who spend it all, as they would save income taxes, yet they wouldn’t have to pay wealth tax. Although these people today have ways of booking consumption as cost of running business, in order to reduce their income. I can’t tell now with 100% certainty, which system would yield the most positive effects.
I generally like the idea of penalizing consumption. But to maintain regional competition, VAT rates would have to differ regionally. But the EU has a problem with that. In the US they have sales tax.
Some will argue that you make the tax system more tight and fair, if you levy a bit from many different sources. But I agree, the total tax burden and the administrative cost to collect and control it is just too high in modern Western countries. I think this is the primary reason for the lack of growth. Complicated regulation and punishing taxation.
While I like this picture, I find it very difficult to have it work in real life. Starting without capital, you’d either have to borrow it or work for someone who has it. This is why capital is so important in capitalist societies, capital gives freedom and opens up options, it’s hard to rise up starting with no capital at all.
I think I’m starting to see your point, though. Someone with a good network or precious skills can turn social or human capital into financial capital, and we don’t tax those, we tax their outpout (work or added value) so why do we tax financial capital? I’ll have to think about it a bit more. On the fly, I’d say it’s still about competition: putting obstacles in the way of staying in a good economic position so that people surpass themselves and find ways to make their capital grow even more.
Doesn’t the value of capital derives from the income this capital has the potential to generate? We could tax one or the other, or both a bit, depending on the outcome we are trying to reach. Taxing capital makes it harder to stay wealthy, so it gives an edge to people trying to rise on the wealth building ladder by drawing down a bit those who are already on top (who then have to display better skills to stay on top, knowing that having access to more capital already helps). Taxing the income generated by capital, when it applies to businesses, is meant to have them reinvest that capital instead of registering it as benefits. When it comes to salaries being taxed, that would be a way to share the burden on most of society. I’m starting to see your point that taxing salaries isn’t the most efficient way to run a society. I’m not sure in what direction I’d take my ideal taxation system, though.
Political games. We live in a society thriving on competition, it is everywhere. People are fighting for their benefits/view of society and a balance comes out of it. What we have now is the current balance, it is subject to change, and will, based on what we do and how much energy we put into it. Votations like this one usually fail, the swiss people are not keen on voting on ideology.
In a vacuum, probably. We have to consider the alternative, though. If you don’t have capital and don’t want to work, would you be happy with your standard of living or would some level of income, even if taxed, increase it enough to make it worth it to you? Then, at some point, spending more time working isn’t worth it anymore because the increase in quality of living isn’t worth the very finite resources we’re expending to get it (time).
Taxation impacts those thresholds so it is also a way to say that past some point, society would expect us to be content with our level of income/wealth and spend our time resource elsewhere, be it raising a family, volunteering, doing politics, or into a new business venture that is not yet profitable. It seems to me that the swiss taxation is designed to have money and capital moving around and working, rather than sitting in a bank safe without loosing value. I like this aspect of it.
Yes, that was my thinking behind it. Progressive income tax makes it hard to become rich. Progressive wealth tax makes it hard to stay rich.
I started with zero capital, ok my parents paid for food and shelter, and I didn’t have to pay for school. But I think I have paid my dues to the Polish state over the 5 years of work, and it’s natural for parents to support their kid. I have not borrowed, I have not received any starting capital (other than my skills). Yet I managed to save up some capital purely through my work.
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