I think #1 in the EU and some strong place somewhere in the top 5 in Europe. It's gotten SO much worse in the past 10-15 years... And not like it was good before that, to begin with.
Oh yeah, I'm aware - I had plans to move to Hungary, to get to know my ancestors' homeland. Completely scrapped it and won't even think about visiting until Orbán's head in on a pike and his whole party of cronies is exiled.
If you're not a billionaire and against this, you're pretty much a moron and if you're thinking one day you'll be a billionaire, you won't be based on your thought process alone.
There's no sensible reason why anyone should have no resistance accumulating that much wealth to themselves. It isn't infinite money for everyone, essentially you're taking it from others. Yes, some fools kind of deserve or are themselves at blame for parting from their own money, but if there are no stops, it doesn't motivate others from making sure they create methods to keep doing this to others. All to gain, nothing to lose.
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.
Correct, but there are those that would take this as a source of truth and run with it. It's not the smart thing to do, but we already see people doing this sort of behavior on other social media.
We shouldn't enable the problem, even if it's an innocent mistake
I don't buy this argument - if you're going to claim something to be the case, it should at least vaguely resemble the truth. Going by the 'rules' of this meme, Sweden should be right next to the U.S, or even take the U.S' place given that the U.S ranks better on wealth equality (not income equality where Sweden ranks better).
We should absolutely tax billionaires more. We should make memes about it to spread the word. We should also make those memes at least kind of accurate.
To understand one significant downside of this - Swedes reading this meme might think that we don't have a billionaire-taxation problem in our country. That's actively harmful to the cause.
57% is the tax on "one-time gains" - bonuses and other such things.
This means that you're probably overpaying on it, but you might also be underpaying on your income taxes (usually ~30% even if you reach the ~50%-tax bracket). Worst case scenario, you've lent some money interest-free to the government that you get back on your tax returns.
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.
I think what limits its effectiveness is mostly that it's only the NL doing it. If it was EU wide, or even US-wide, the world would change a lot.
Even if it's not perfect now, I see that it is good that this tax exists for two reasons:
At least it's not taxing wages or consumption, which affect everyone but billionaires.
It serves as a model for going in that direction, so neolibs can't easily say there is no way to tax assets, or that taxing assets would crash the economy.
The property tax rate where I'm at is 1.7%, and the appraisal districts WAY undervalue properties. A house will sell for 5 million in the city where I work, and their value on the tax roll is $300,000.
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.
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.
