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The issue is who pays for the welfare state. Finland got a lot of its wealth through off sea oil I think. Not easy to replicate in almost every part of the worl

• Scarblac 4y ago
  Norway got rich off oil, Finland isn't especially rich afaik.
• KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Norway, not Finland. >The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce. Sure, the thought of being worth only 150 billion dollars rather than 300 would stop Bezos from starting Amazon.
  • xvector 4y ago
    Bezos would not have kept Amazon in the US if it adopted Nordic welfare levels of taxation. The fact of the matter is that the EU has a staggeringly low output when it comes to tech innovation compared to the US. Their policies and regulations shape this.
    • jimnotgym 4y ago
      ...and lots of other factors, like access to risk capital.
    • chrischen 4y ago
      The US is prized because of its large market… not because it’s a tax dodge. The US dan cut off access to any company unwilling to pay local taxes just like how China forces any foreign company wanting to tap into its large market to give majority control to a local entity.
      • uffndnjfncnc 4y ago
        The EU is a large market too but startup founders aren't going there.
        • johannes1234321 4y ago
          EU has a market on legislative base, however in language, culture, ... it is split. It is very hard to build a company serving larger parts of Europe.
          • uffndnjfncnc 4y ago
            Many American companies have done it. Instagram is very popular across the EU.
            • johannes1234321 4y ago
              They started with an American focus, holding doors open for others and once things were running expanded more actively. Also they were acquired after 1.5 years when not even having a Android app, which is more spread in Europe than US compared to iphone
      • svnt 4y ago
        The US is absolutely a tax dodge because of low capital gains taxes and low corporate tax rates. Marginal personal income tax rates, which is what others keep comparing here, are only relevant for wage earners.
        • chrischen 4y ago
          It's all relative isn't it? Singapore is a tax dodge, but I would't characterize low corporate income taxes as a tax dodge. How does one get money out of a corporation if not via marginal personal income tax rates?
          • svnt 4y ago
    • jliptzin 4y ago
      I looked up taxation in Norway, it looks very similar to ours. Personal marginal tax rates cap at 48% and corporate taxes are 23%. What am I missing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Norway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Norway
      • dkga 4y ago
        It has nothing to do with taxation - or else the Arab Gulf or Cayman Islands would be entrepreneurial hubs, not California or the Toronto area. It’s all about the price of quality labour. It’s about access to long-term risk capital (aka venture funds) + high quality labour at affordable prices. As in, entrepreneurs having cash to fund projects and being able to actually hire people that will help build them. Try hiring a hundred software engineers in Norway: your hourly cost would probably blow up. The low-tax destinations are the place billionaires go to park their wealth, not create it (for example, outside of Tech Nordic billionaires move to Switzerland after they get rich)
        • Annatar 4y ago
          [dead]
        • pcl 4y ago
          > Try hiring a hundred software engineers in Norway: your hourly cost would probably blow up. Depends what you’re comparing to. Total comp for great engineers in Oslo is lower than for their peers in Silicon Valley.
          • htkibar 4y ago
            Total cost to the company may not be. Employees are costlier to the companies in Europe.
        • winReInstall 4y ago
          Also you get really great engineers in norway, something about the lack of light, cold, snowy eternal night, produces excellent devs. Lots of fantastic open source projects exist due to the vikings no longer using boats..
    • IronIvan 4y ago
      Can confirm. Lived a very frugal early retirement lifestyle in Austria because it was practically impossible to build wealth (high taxes, comparatively very low tech salaries, little entrepreneurial support/incentives). Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifestyle since. Looking back, it really boggles my mind how much engineering potential is squandered in Europe. You'd have to be an idiot to want to work hard given how raw of a deal you are getting (work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!) and people understand that intuitively (hence pushing for ever fewer work hours or even days because what else is there if your salary is essentially capped and you quickly hit a 50 % tax rate (when combining income tax and social security) for every additional hour worked). </rant>
      • uffndnjfncnc 4y ago
        [flagged]
      • sph 4y ago
        Not all of Europe runs on a 50% tax rate though. My tax rate as company director in the United Kingdom is somewhere around 25%, and I can afford higher salaries than the rest of Europe while still enjoying the basic safety net of public health care. But I'm originally from Italy, and the tax rate is exorbitant down there as well, with ridiculously low salaries. You do you, but there is more to life than gross income from your employer. This is why I'd rather stay in this continent.
      • washmyelbows 4y ago
        I'll be lucky if I can afford a single family home after 20 years of software engineering in the US. halfway there now, we'll see. Moving to a senior position has helped but I feel like a lot of people forget that the compensation in SV is not normal in other places.
        • alistairSH 4y ago
          SV is an outlier in both income and housing costs. Here in DC metro, a mid-career developer should be able to afford a home without much trouble. Many of the best jobs are well outside the city (Tysons to Ashburn corridor) where housing costs aren’t terrible.
    • KptMarchewa 4y ago
      "Consumer tech" like social media. And the reason is 30+ different smaller markets, because this business makes little sense if you can't capture 100s of millions of users.
    • dd36 4y ago
      Your taxes shouldn’t be based on where your HQ is but rather where your customers are.
      • stanislavb 4y ago
        Please go file your taxes in 37 different countries with different regulations where your customers are. You will bankrupt from your accountants’ bills.
    • s3000 4y ago
      Amazon doesn't make profits and thus doesn't pay taxes. Bezos doesn't sell much and thus doesn't pay taxes either. Changing rates wouldn't change anything. Tax rates only affect the middle class, and as @jliptzin has pointed out, those tax rates are quite similar. The EU has a lower output because there are fewer investors. One successful startup creates wealth in the hand of knowledgeable people who can create the next startup. There are simply not thousands of millionaires and billionaires who can successfully pick the next round. There is also less of a network effect where venture capitalists can offer their portfolio as leads for the sales teams of their new investments. The Nordic welfare levels can turn out to be the path to European success. It's easier to start an idea when failure doesn't end in an existential crisis.
• andrepd 4y ago
  1. Finland doesn't have oil, you're mistaking it for Norway. 2. Progressive taxation is the basis on which the best places to live were built. This is an empirical observation, make of that what you will, but it's strange to give your gut feelings of "basic economics / human nature" more weight than objective reality. 3. Why do is the word "rob" applied to taxation? Without the state to at least enforce laws, enforce property rights, and physically protect you, there wouldn't even be any wealth creation. Your current life is only possible because you are inserted in a society, it's only far you have a debt to pay society back.
  • uffndnjfncnc 4y ago
    You should visit Tokyo. Japan spends very low on welfare.
    • serverholic 4y ago
      Oh yeah the salaryman life sounds fantastic /s
    • andrekandre 4y ago
      what is your definition of welfare?
  • tosc 4y ago
    >!Without the state to at least enforce laws, enforce property rights, and physically protect you, there wouldn't even be any wealth creation. This is the kind of minimalist state that libertarians would agree to. People talk about robbery when the state is spending money on arbitrary things.
    • kwhitefoot 4y ago
      Arbitrary? Or just things they don't agree with?
      • tosc 4y ago
• data_maan 4y ago
  This comment distorts what is happening by using the word "robbing". Why not "supporting"? Perhaps Peter has earned his cash by working really hard. But perhaps not, perhaps he just exploited other people to hustle his way up some corporate food chain.
  • IronIvan 4y ago
    This type of thinking is pure toxin because it essentially reinforces exactly what you don't want. If Peter did in fact work hard and now he's stripped of the results of his labor while being told that probably he only managed to accumulate capital because he was just exploiting others, what incentive landscape does that create. Is a lot of profit a function of factors much less commendable than creating value for others? Sure. But by lumping in the productive people with the parasites, you are undermining those people who deserve your protection the most.
    • danaris 4y ago
      Nobody, at least in the US system, gets very wealthy just by working hard. At the very least, you have to start out with wealth or a strong support system (which is down to luck in your input conditions), or get fantastically lucky in your first(-ish) attempt at starting something. Then, if you want to make the kind of money that, say, Bezos or Musk makes, you have to make the kinds of decisions that many of us simply would never make, because they're morally reprehensible. I wrote another comment about this [0] on an article about a week ago, but basically, in the very best case scenario, once you're past the point where more money would make no material difference in a healthy lifestyle (which is going to happen, at the very latest, somewhere in the millions), if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013858
      • prottog 4y ago
        Nobody anywhere gets very wealthy just by working hard. Otherwise the world would be filled with millionaire janitors. > if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil. If you're using your business to create value for millions of people, you are in fact improving millions of lives by the amount of value created. If you capture a little bit of that value for yourself and become fantastically rich, good for you and good for the system that enabled this whole thing. Even better for you if you decide to give some of it away, but to call you evil if you don't? I suppose your own belt could be tightened a bit more so that you could give more away? Other than what arises from rent-seeking behavior, profit is not inherently immoral.
• KaiserPro 4y ago
  the UK (used) to have a reasonably comprehensive welfare net, and has a larger number of companies per capita compared to the USA. One of the things that are never really discussed in these kind of things is that you are already paying for welfare, its just not even. Poverty leads to crime, which costs you, either in lost property, crap neighbourhoods, or in insurance.
• throwaway14356 4y ago
  whose issue is that?? unlike the US you can just leave and not pay. it seems to me people outside countries with decent welfare have all of the issues? something like give me private jets or let me starve by the side of the road, nothing in between must exist. i actually enjoy paying for people playing video games all day while smoking weed and getting drunk while businesses scream how they cant find employees. Specially the combi self centered and assholes really cant find anyone anymore. You have to pay what it costs to hire people. If the offer isn't competitive with not working you are going to have to pay more. Long term employees are also leaving for better jobs. ill gladly pay for the transition back to sanity.
• jontebol 4y ago
  That’s easy. The hugely successful entrepreneurs that have been able to start their business due to the welfare state contribute back by paying taxes on their success. I’m a decently successful saas-founder, and I don’t mind paying taxes on my profits. I don’t view it as being robbed. I view it as contributing back to the system that backed me. Also, banks should chip in a lot more than they do. They’re basically printing money and should be taxed harder.
• TomSwirly 4y ago
  > The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce. And yet when the top tax rate was 96%, Americans still produced. When I was 12, I was impressed by Atlas Shrugged, but by the time I was 17 I realized it was ludicrous.
  • hker999 4y ago
    Most wealthy Americans were never paying 96% in taxes, if any at all. There were many more loopholes during this time. People are forgetting that the high tax countries are enjoying the fruits of lower-tax countries labor. Technology and drugs are the big ones. Big, evil companies create life-saving drugs and generics are created and sold for pennies to these countries. With no incentive to create (ie: large profits), humans will definitely not advance. Money is also freedom. The less we are able to keep, the less free we become (and more dependent on the government/state).
    • serverholic 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
        If the likely financial outcome were the same between making music and writing software for banks or insurance companies, I sure as hell wouldn't go anywhere near a computer. Do you think people do Office Space style work out of the goodness of their own hearts? > That’s frankly ridiculous. The feeling is mutual.
        • serverholic 4y ago
          Uh, have you heard of open source software? The world is full of software that people built because it’s interesting and/or useful. Linux for example was created as a hobby project during college. People love to create. Just because YOU wouldn’t touch software doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone.
• neilwilson 4y ago
  They pay for it by spending the money - which induces higher production, higher sales - and higher taxes without ever changing the tax percentage. There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, nor a fixed amount of money. Otherwise turnover, ie GDP, would never rise. Don't get your stocks and flows mixed up.