Federal savings measures - Potential tax increases

tldr;

What we have here are Swiss politics working. None of the propositions should be considered as set and on its way to be implemented as is. In fact, it’s possible none of them will. We are at the very early stages of all this and are discussing the propositions of outside experts with no actual power to implement them. The political safety nets haven’t really entered into play yet.

It works like that for many things, we just don’t know of a whole bunch of proposals that never saw the light of day. This one draws more attention toward it but just like any other any and all individual proposals may not make it to the final version and/or may have been tampered with to the point of being unrecognisable. There is nothing actionable for an individual investor/citizen emanating from this report at this point.

Longer version:

What we are having here are experts doing recommandations. Experts are going to do proposals like that, they’re just people getting paid to study a situation and propose solutions.

Then the political safety nets enter into action:

The Federal Council has approved their report, which only means the tasks the experts had been contracted for leading to this report are over. The Federal Council also deems the report worth studying and has defined a few, very broad lines of investigation in order to move forward. They have not at this point approved any single specific measure to my knowledge.

Source:
[DE]: Aufgaben- und Subventionsüberprüfung: Bundesrat begrüsst Bericht der Expertengruppe
[FR]: Réexamen des tâches et des subventions : le Conseil fédéral approuve le rapport du groupe d’experts
[IT]: Verifica dei compiti e riesame dei sussidi: il Consiglio federale accoglie favorevolmente il rapporto del gruppo di esperti

That doesn’t mean anything for any singular proposition at this point. When the Federal Council will be done with it, it will go to the parliament who will also amend, scratch and/or add measures according to their will. Both chambers will have a back and forth that will lead to heavy changes that can range from rejecting all measures together to adopting them all and adding some through making any of them unrecognisable due to heavy changes.

Then if it goes through both chambers, a referendum can be launched and in case of success, it will have to be voted on by the population that can accept or reject it.

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It looks like this proposal would favor people who retire early.

They only have capital income and you need a lot of wealth to have a capital income of over 50k.

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On a withdrawal of 1.5M you are looking at 172k of taxes (if withdrawal is fully taxed as income) instead of 34k of taxes as currently. Basically 5x more.

If an income is calculated and resulting tax rate is applied to the whole amount, then you get 42k of taxes - about 23% more.

Fully taxing the withdrawal amount as income in a single year is out of the question. That would heavily penalize retirement savings, which would be unconstitutional and it would also be far away from the described intent of the current proposal (which is to align taxes of capital withdrawal and pension payments).

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I tried to estimate the impact of Proposal in comment below.
For a withdrawal of 1.5 MM capital -: Additional federal tax ranges from 6.5 K to 120 K depending on “Other personal annual income” at time of withdrawal.

Are your tables correct. Do you calculate the effective tax rate on the additional income. I tried a couple of numbers and didn’t match what you calculated. Maybe you calculated an overall tax rate for income + additional capital withdrawal tax?

Actually I tallied my numbers with the calculator that was shared by newspaper

These numbers should be correct assuming fictitious income (based withdrawal amount) is used in combination with Other income to establish the tax rate for capital withdrawals

Capital withdrawal tax rate = function (withdrawal amount, other annual income)

As far as I understand -: the whole proposal is only for lumpsum tax. There is no proposal to change the federal tax for annual income . It would even increase further the impact

So this amount should be see as „extra“ tax burden for lumpsum withdrawals only.

Could you share what error you see?

So does the difference calculated represent:

(income + virtual income) @ federal tax rate

minus

(income @ fed tax rate + capital withdrawal taxes)

No
It just represents

Federal taxes for withdrawal with new rules

Minus

Federal taxes for withdrawal with old rules

I haven’t studied the list above, but according to my understanding and formula based tax calculator:

Today: 1.5m withdrawal is 34.493 federal tax, 2.3% (double check: roughly 12% / 5)

Proposal, no additional progression: 1.5m would become 75k of fictional income

  • 75k income is 798 in tax, or 1.1% on average
  • 1.5m * 1.1% = 15.960. Less than half, if there’s no min. level

Proposal, with additional progression (50k other taxable income):

  • 125k income is 3.315 in tax, or 2.7%
  • 1.5m * 2.7% = 39.780. 15% more

Note: based on married table 2024

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But if you have 50k of other income, that would be taxed anyway, right? So then we need to deduct the tax on the 50k to do a fair comparison to the other scenarios.

Here is the official calculator

https://gox.ch/steuerrechner.html

Note -: this only goes to 1 Million withdrawals

The tax of income is not going to change
So there is nothing to deduct

Let’s take an example

Case 1 -: today
1.5 M capital withdrawal and 100K annual income
Tax -: C1 for capital withdrawn
Tax -: P1 for income tax on 100K

Case 2 -: proposed
1.5 M capital withdrawal and 100K annual income
Tax -: C2 for capital withdrawn
Tax -: P1 for income tax on 100K

Only C2 is changing to a higher number vs C1
Rest is unchanged

In this example C2 is approx 51K more than C1

But in #1 above, there is no tax on income included. In #2, there is no tax in income included. In #3 there is tax on income included. So #3 cannot be fairly compared to #1 and #2 without adjustment.

Yes, I was just trying to understand whether people are really comparing C1 to C2, or are they comparing C1 to (C2+P1) by looking at tax on the full 125k.

I am only comparing C1 and C2
This would change depending on Single / married / kids etc

The table I shared was for single person / no kids

In your 2nd table, the tax doesn’t increase with income, so you are only calculating tax on the capital withdrawal and ignore tax on income.

In the first table, on a withdrawal of 1.5m, you have 75k of income and assuming 150k of income, you calculate a tax rate of 7.3% (actually 7.28% without rounding). But this is tax on 225k of income!

This is actually 16k of tax on 225k of income+capital.

But this includes income tax on 150k of 7k (which you didn’t include in the 2nd table). So the tax attributable to the capital withdrawal is actually 16k-7k = 9k. So the effective tax rate on the capital is actually 12.2%, not 7.3% as you stated.

You are not comparing like with like. If you want to compare like with like, you either need to add income tax to table 2, or remove income tax on table 1.

In second table tax is not increasing with income because in current tax approach, the capital tax doesn’t increase with income

Irrespective of annual income, the lumpsum tax is same . Isn’t it?

yes, but then you are comparing (tax on capital) with (tax on capital + tax on income)

No this is just tax rate calculation. The actual tax on capital as per new rule is following

Tax (C2) = capital withdrawn x Tax rate

Where
Tax rate = function (taxable income, capital withdrawn)

I would recommend you use the official calculator and use it for 990,000 withdrawal . You will see the number in official calculations match exactly my table

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