There is dreamers out there that hope they will reach the club of the 1%… But by definition, you have 1 chance in 100 to make it in this club… The people in this forum have a higher chance than the general populace, but still I feel it a bit of a irrational to protect the 1% because you hope one day you hope to make it in there… A little bit like arguing for no tax on lottery gains because you play the stupid game.
That is the concept of investing in an ETF such as VT right? At least it has been that for me. You capture a share of the growth of the economy and the work of others with your Capital, and without any effort whatsoever.
Having debts or not debts, nobody cares here I think . Plenty of extremely rich people are loaded with debt and leveraged as hell. It is your net worth that matters at the end.
I found it interesting that the municipal communes of Zurich, Basel and Bern all voted infavour of the 99% initiative, but Geneve ville did not.
If you take the view that people vote for what is best for their own pocket, I would expect Geneve ville to be first in line since across the canton 36% of taxpayers do not pay taxes at all, in Geneve ville the proportion of non taxpayers should be much higher.
Maybe the Geneva people are not that stupid after all? Let me take the occasion to thank all of them, I am so proud to be Swiss today!
It’s a huge relief to see that the Swiss are clever enough to understand the consequences of extremist ideas (be it left and/or right) and not accept them.
a lot of people seems to forget that only 52% of the people went to vote of the people with the right to do so (so 2.8 million total, out of 8.5 million people living in Switzerland. 33% of the people living here).
Usually people that vote are people that care enough to do that and are somewhat informed. I find it dangerous to take this opinion of 33% and generalize it.
Yes, but I think @bamboo meant it’s hard to accumulate capital in the first place. And you’re already being taxed in the process.
Investing requires postponing consumption, which is hard for most people to achieve. Only if you can provide for all your needs with your income, and then generate that extra amount of work, can we see any accumulation of capital.
Where to? Most most countries with lower (or no) taxes are either hideously expensive or shitholes (some of them beyond a glitzy surface).
No - merely having no debt wouldn’t have targeted you at all.
These left-wingers just think someone who makes for capital income than almost any normal, ordinary person from work (100’000 CHF/year) should contribute a bit more to society and pay higher taxes.
True - but the initiators did. That’s one of the things that had me frowning upon this (also, I think their 150% proposal wasn’t an elegant solution to begin with).
Which “middle” has more than 100k in capital income in a year?
Do you believe the majority is stupid?
You’re not implying this initiative was “extremist”, are you?
It was a simple tax hike. No more, no less.
If you call that “extremist”, you have no idea what “extremist” policy around the world means,
This triggers me more than it should. The economy is not a zero-sum game. Income is the measurement of added value provided to the economy. So the richest people contribute the most to the society, because they generate the most added value.
And on top of that, they pay the highest taxes. In the video I posted, the guy says that top 1% generates 20% of a country’s income, but 40% of tax revenue. (this could be for USA but CH is surely similar).
In all this discussion about how much taxes being paid by rich and by others, I am missing one thing: how much taxes being paid to public budget by companies. By top 3? By the rest of SMI/SLI? By all others? I would be curious to see this kind of statistics. Anyone have an idea?
That doesn’t seem trivially true. If you’re born into wealth and don’t do anything except getting return from capital, what is the added value (it’s the wealth working for you, not you, if it gets redistributed it’s still working, but for more people).
I’d say it’s a rough estimate. Yes, you can find outliers, but they are a minority:
Receiving wealth as gift/inheritance. My counter-argument would be, that it’s the donors who created the added value and they are at the discretion to do with it as they please.
Fraud/theft. Obviously if someone steals, then he didn’t get rich by generating added value.
Lavish consumption. You create added value and then you destroy it carelessly, using up natural resources. It’s destroying value that should be taxed.
Exploitation of natural resources. Some countries have access to oil/gas/coal, all they did was just mine that stuff. Polluting fresh water and air, cutting down trees, killing animals, all this is stealing from future generations.
Oh, I’m convinced it does. You just receive the net income of the business conducted by the company who manages your capital. They have produced added value and sold it to customers, who were happy to pay for it, because to them the perceived added value was higher than the price they paid. Let’s say a product costs $1’000, but the added value to the customer is $1’200 and the cost to produce is $800. So both the customer and the producer has a subjective gain of $200.
But you didn’t lift a finger, right? Why should you cash in this income? Well, I think it’s because either you were the one who set up this company, the machines and the products that add value to the customers, or you have taken over the shares of someone who wanted an exit. And for this you first needed to provide added value yourself, without consuming it instantly. First you provide added value, then you limit consumption, then you accumulate purchasing power, then you invest in capital that adds value to customers.
If you are an artist and paint some paintings or compose some music and then you receive return from the art gallery of from the radio, your art is your capital, you put work to create it, and now you passively receive income on it. Is it fair to tax this income?
It’s about finding the balance. If we reduce the incentive for entrepreneurs to start businesses by taxing return on capital too highly, there will be fewer succesful companies and less innovation.
The distribution of wealth in the USA looks terrible in comparison to Europe but they have a huge entrepreneurial spirit. Look how succesful their businesses are, they dominate the list of biggest companies in MSCI world. Think how different our lives would be in Europe without the innovation of Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel,…
Maybe in comparison to the average of Europe, but not in comparison to Germany, Netherlands… Denmark and… Sweden? There is also Russia, Brazil and India. It’s hard to tell what all these countries with the highest wealth inequality have in common.
I don’t know much about the Gini coefficient but my clear observation having visited USA often is that there seems to be more cases of extreme high and low wealth than in WE. You sense the difference immediately from staff working in the respective airports. Possibly part of it is higher immigration and the aspiration of the “American Dream”?
This was a topic all along the campaign.
Switzerland has limited differences in income compared to other countries.
Switzerland has large difference in wealth compared to other countries.
But second pillar is not counted as wealth. If you would take the second pillar in the wealth it would strongly reduce the difference.
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. Plenty of extremely rich people are loaded with debt and leveraged as hell. It is your net worth that matters at the end.
