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Norway doesn’t have that, but it does have a wealth tax, which I like. If your net wealth sums to over 2mnok (approx $200k), you pay some percentage of tax on t

Norway doesn’t have that, but it does have a wealth tax, which I like. If your net wealth sums to over 2mnok (approx $200k), you pay some percentage of tax on that wealth, every year. There are plenty of exemptions, your primary residence is only worth a quarter of assessed value, and of course this is net wealth, so mortgages and things subtract from this. But it does mean that if you’re just sitting on a horde of gold, you’ll anyways pay taxes, which makes sense to me. Just because you became wealthy enough to stop earning any income doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for your share of keeping society running.

Applejinx 3y ago
I've done some math on this. It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits. You really, really don't need to go all 'Beatles Taxman' on it and confiscate everything over X amount. You can take just 1% of the pool of wealth and come out with enormous funding by the standards of what we use social benefits for. The play money is so many orders of magnitude beyond what's used to keep society creaking along, that it's positively silly. The tiniest of wealth tax percentages can amount to whole social services budgets. These social services stop people with pitchforks from going after the billionaires and each other.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits The problem in Norway's case is that the a lot of the richest people just moved to Switzerland or wherever...
- datavirtue 3y ago
  A though occurred to me the other day. Taxes have become the offset for the inefficiencies capitalism. Each entity is independent, and therefore has to reproduce common things that could have been shared if society was organized differently. Rabid liberalism is expensive.

Applejinx 3y ago

I've done some math on this. It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits. You really, really don't need to go all 'Beatles Taxman' on it and confiscate everything over X amount. You can take just 1% of the pool of wealth and come out with enormous funding by the standards of what we use social benefits for. The play money is so many orders of magnitude beyond what's used to keep society creaking along, that it's positively silly. The tiniest of wealth tax percentages can amount to whole social services budgets. These social services stop people with pitchforks from going after the billionaires and each other.

qwytw 3y ago
> It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits The problem in Norway's case is that the a lot of the richest people just moved to Switzerland or wherever...
datavirtue 3y ago
A though occurred to me the other day. Taxes have become the offset for the inefficiencies capitalism. Each entity is independent, and therefore has to reproduce common things that could have been shared if society was organized differently. Rabid liberalism is expensive.