If I remember my optimal taxation classes correctly there seems to be some consensus that the tax base should be as broad as possible.
Which. if I understand it correctly, means something like “most income and expenditure should be taxed at least a little”. The reasoning behind it is that a very small tax on income/wealth/goods is not very distortionary (small deadweight loss) no matter what you believe about the specifics about the demand and supply.
Of course that doesn’t tell us a lot about how tax rates should vary exactly. But it would imply that “don’t tax X” is often not a good idea but “tax X less” might be.
Not everyone will always manage to become successful or even self-sustainable in life. I prefer to accept it. Gaussian distribution. If there are too many people in this situation, there is a (1st world) problem in the society. But we should not throw them away.
I am against charity, see above.
Well, there are should be some security forces. Maybe police and army may merge somehow, although they are not the same.
I find it very surprising. When people talk about welfare state, I don’t think about US. I think about Sweden, Norway, Finland. Am I wrong?
We have this problem because there are no minimum wages. This is where I draw a line. Unemployed, disabled, even “lazy” non-working may get a state support to survive (a bonus to not compete for work places), I see no problem. But a person working reasonable amount of time should earn enough to live and not need a state support to survive. I find it a shame for a society where it is not the case. So the problem is not too much socialism, it is too much (economic) liberalism.
Did you ask how much they get “for free”?
Again, I have no desire to conduct this analysis myself, but it would be interesting to see what are “net” taxes (minus benefits) looks like in different countries. In Switzerland one can differentiate to the level of communes. For example I heard that public transport is always deficitary, otherwise it is too expensive and ultimately useless.
Left without a control from society, which is (normally) represented by the government, capital will only run for profits screwing everything on its way. If you want, this is an optimization problem of maximizing one parameter (profit) without adequate boundary conditions (law, environment, social aspects).
I already linked to that video a long time ago. Because I find it a very interesting concept. However, I don’t think optimizing for equality should be the goal. Equality is this annoying goal, that people somehow think is desirable. The goal should be the elimination of poverty. People in their nature don’t want to be equal. They want to be better than their neighbors. This AI model probably doesn’t take human psychology into account. Would we still give 100% if it only gave us a minor improvement over our peers? I doubt it.
A lack of equality doesn’t mean someone’s getting hurt. Equality doesn’t mean it’s all rosy.
Imagine a carpenter made tables. He would be taxed progressively, 10% more for each extra table sold. 1st table 10%, 2nd 20%, 10th table 100%. So for sure he would not make more than 10 tables per month, even if he was a total workaholic and had spare capacity. He would probably settle for 5-6 tables per month, as he could not be bothered to work hard and have 70+% being taken away from him. So now compare these two scenarios where in one he makes 10 tables and in the other one only 5. 5 tables which didn’t get produced, and which could have been used by some customers. He wouldn’t steal that extra money from anyone, he would have provided added value to the economy.
If I understood the Swiss Reduit from WWII and Cold War plans - the idea basically is to make it for occupation power as bad as NATO had it in Afganistan. For that, you need a militia and conscription(or enough religious nuts).
But overall I agree that whole idea of raising taxes for wealth because income taxes are higher is stupid. What about lowering income taxes? So the poor people will have more money? Rich are paying most taxes anyway (In absolute numbers)
Sorry, but can you enlighten us here? When I declare my dividends (what you call “income from capital”) they are added to my salary, so they are taxed exactly the same way. I could even argue that they get taxed at a higher rate than my income from work because of the way the tax rate increases with absolute amounts.
The only way your hypothesis could be true is if you don’t declare your dividends. But that’s illegal
I haven’t live in Norway, just visiting. My impression was is that while you are young, you get lots for free. Education is free. So it is totally fine to have children when you are 20, don’t have to wait until you are 35 and have your career in a good shape. But later you pay for it with taxes higher than in other countries. And you can better trust people around, because they are not desperate for money.
There are cities with free public transport, so yeah, you pay for it no matter if you are using it or not. Call it communism if you want, but the reasons to do it is to reduce number of cars and pollution in the city.
There isn’t a form of transportation that is more subsidized than cars.
Land is valuable, especially in cities and look how much space is wasted on car infrastructure for the tiny number of people who can be transported by it. Bern train station manages around 300’000 people per day. You’d need around 5 highways to manage that many people.
Cities that limit the access of cars to the center are more productive and more livable.
Lots of politics here that I don’t want to go into too much! Just one thought, regardless if one thinks it is “unfair” that Patron’s brother gets stuff for nothing, in event that the social welfare budget helps avoid deprived neighbourhoods with successive generations of unemployed on the scale of the UK (for example) then it pays itself back several times over
Back to the intiative, I am against it primarily because
I think asking anyone to pay 60% tax (marginal tax 40% x 1.5) on an income is too much and not necessary with the current budgetary situation
wealth tax already exists, why not discuss increasing that ?(although I don’t think it is necessary)
I don’t like the tone of a large majority (99%) voting to take away from a minority (1%) or the precedent it would set
The border between capital gains and dividend is pretty fluid, though, or? Like Berkshire that never paid dividend. OK, you could argue that they keep reinvesting all returns, so they never show any profit.
Capital gains: Increase in price of the title of ownership of a security or an asset.
Dividends: when a company distributes cash to its owners. Dividends usually comes out of profits, but not necessarily: you could imagine a company suffering losses but still paying a dividend to its shareholders (that would obviously not be sustainable).
Profits: Difference over a year between accrued revenues (sales) and accrued costs.
Equity: difference between assets and liabilities of a company, at a given time. Equity, profits and dividends need to follow the below relationship:
Capital gains usually occur because a company is making more and more profits year after year, and thus new investors are willing to pay more to own the company.
Back to Berkshire:
They indeed never paid a dividend, and reinvested profits into the business.
As of today, their balance sheet shows retained earnings (= cumulative profits since inception) of $444.6 billion. That’s not really what I would call “They never show any profit”.
As to taxation in Switzerland, we know that dividends are taxed, and capital gains are not.
The trick comes when you own investment funds invested in dividend-paying companies: you may have a capital gain in the price of your fund share, but often Swiss fiscal authorities consider the dividends paid by investee companies as taxable.
Is your brother on social assistance? The money he gets is not for free. If he inherits something or start working, he needs to repay what he received. Since of course this is problematic, people are struggling to “get out” from social assistance vicious circle. But is not free. If something happens to a wealthy relative of your brother, or he wins the lottery, the social services are going to get the entire inheritance and your brother won’t see a dime. So for the majority of cantons is not really free and reimbursement is mandatory. Let’s not share untruths.
Nice try to give a simple explanation but it is not as simple.
As sdhareholder you can receive cash from a company and this cash is considered as capital gain because it had been obtained as such ( a bank making capital gain from trading activity for example) This is usually the case for a part of the cash you receive from UBS, Credit Suisse, Zurich Insurance and many other companies.
This is probably the reason for the motivation of the JUSO to introduce this initiative.
On my side I find many difficulties with this initiative. If you live in a tax expensive canton then your marginal tax rate on the dividend will be as high as 65% which I find demotivating. I would find much more positive to reduce the large difference between the canton that are expensive or cheap for the tax. Unfortunately this is almost impossible in a federal state.
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