6 ms·

Swiss voters back e-ID and abolish rental tax

72 points by YakBizzarro 1y ago

poszlem 1y ago
There’s nothing inherently wrong with e-ID, it can be mighty useful, especially when implemented thoughtfully. The real problem is when it’s imposed despite widespread societal opposition and refusal (which obviously is not the issue here, but is in other countries).
- Lukas_Skywalker 1y ago
  I agree that it can be useful, but I fear that in the future, we will have many more online platforms that require an ID than we currently do. In the past, things like age verification required users to upload a scan or photo, and someone had to verify it. Because that was too much work for the platform operators, they didn't do it (or only with the banner "Are you over 18?"). With the e-ID instead, this will be much simpler to implement. And I expect it to become much more widespread in the future.
  - traspler 1y ago
    Even though I am for the eID I do share your worry but I don‘t think it‘s hopeless. Both politically and socially there are avenues to combat such over-identification. Still, most uses will probably more private than sharing copies of your ID so I am not sure what the gain for companies will be as it might just limit the customer base without much data gained. That does not seem in the interest of those companies. It‘s easier for the government to enforce certain checks, which is also not ideal but still there are avenues to fight this if it happens.
  - dbrgn 1y ago
    Quite a few actually do require ID-scan-through-email (which is horrible). Or, they simply delegate to a third party video ident service, often in another country (because cheaper). How exactly is the status quo not much worse than "I give you a cryptographic hash proving that I am over 18, but nothing else, and without the state knowing that this transaction happened"?
    - Lukas_Skywalker 1y ago
      The status quo is that companies which are required by law to have this information (banks, telecommunication providers etc) do require an ID scan (and often video identification as well). All the others don't really care and just let you register with whatever name and birthdate you want, because the ID scan method is too cumbersome and expensive to them. I expect those to move to eID, effectively requiring people to have an eID, with no way to provide false information.
- miohtama 1y ago
  Indian Aadhaar has some examples discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41608810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41608810
- tehjoker 1y ago
  The inherently wrong part about it is that it is extremely easy to revoke at the push of a button, vs a physical card that must be physically confiscated.
- Arwill 1y ago
  I hate that everything is being pushed onto the phone. Its a single point of failure.
mrob 1y ago
Unlike the proposed UK digital ID (which is not a "card"), this one is optional. Nobody is being forced to buy a smartphone and accept Apple or Google's terms of service.
- crimsoneer 1y ago
  But the Swiss already have a unique digital identifier for everyone living and working in Switzerland (your AVS number I think?) so it's really not optional, and is the primary purpose of the new UK id. The actual application itself is much of a muchness. Also, the UK gov has already said there will be solutions for old people/time travellers/the Amish etc without phones. Nobody is going to force anybody to buy a phone.
  - mrob 1y ago
    AFAIK, the UK gov has only said there will be solutions for people unable to use a phone, not people unwilling to use a phone.
    - crimsoneer 1y ago
      " As part of our consultation, we will be making sure the scheme is inclusive by considering: - physical alternatives are available for those without smartphones " From https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-id-scheme-explainer/digital-id-scheme-explainer?utm_source=chatgpt.com#how-we-will-ensure-it-is-available-to-everyone https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-id-scheme...
  - kgwgk 1y ago
    >the Swiss already have a unique digital identifier Digital as in being a sequence of thirteen digits?
- pheggs 1y ago
  Define optional? There will be new checks introduced online where you can only enter if you have an E-ID. Companies do have to accept a physical card as well, but only if you appear physically at the companies doors. Otherwise, that statement was kind of deceptive in my opinion because there will be a lot of pressure to get one. They also decided to make it free, which shows they probably want to achieve a high adoption.
ivell 1y ago
Swiss e-ID is self sovereign and built on open protocols. https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch
- pheggs 1y ago
  I like that it is open source, I don't like that they use SD-JWT tokens which contain hashes of people's names for things like age verification.
  - taminka 1y ago
    why is that bad?
    - Sayrus 1y ago
      I'm guessing you'd want to separate age verification from identity verification. A hash of your name is as good as your name since you don't change name and you provide both to certain providers, or it can be bruteforced.
      - pheggs 1y ago
        It's a bit better than that, you really have to get access to the disclosure because the hash also contains a salt. But it's a needless risk
  - grothoff 1y ago
    It's only partially open source. Some server-side code remains proprietary, and the client-side will depend on proprietary code of Google and Apple and they do not plan to support platforms that are actually Free Software. The law overall is badly written. For example, articles 12 and 26 effectively say that "The source is shared with public, except if it is proprietary or insecure." Or take Article 4: "The government may operate systems that protect the privacy of the identity subjects."
    - 1y ago
mulmen 1y ago
Abolishing rental tax is huge. What does that do for affordability?
- benbojangles 1y ago
  makes swiss landlords richer. Foreign nationals cannot own rental homes.
  - DougN7 1y ago
    Can you go into more detail?
    - config_yml 1y ago
      This only affects homeowners who live in their own property, not landlords. If you earn rent on your property, you will still pay income tax on it.
  - grothoff 1y ago
    Not quite. If you reside in Switzerland, you can own rental homes. Just foreign non-residents cannot buy.
  - YakBizzarro 1y ago
    Not at all, it depends on the residence permit. With a C permit you can buy and rent properties, while with B you can buy only your own home
- m101 1y ago
  The price of houses has just gone up because they have removed a real estate tax. Simple, and short sighted. The taxes need to be raised from somewhere so now let's see what convoluted and complex schemes they come up with to do that.
- brainwad 1y ago
  Not much. They are moving from a regime where owner-occupier mortgage interest is deductible but you have to pay income tax on the imputed rental value of your owner-occupied home, to one where you don't pay the tax but also can't take the deduction. For most Swiss people, who rent, it doesn't directly affect them. And even for most owner-occupiers, they never pay off their mortgages, and so the two effects currently cancel out. It's mostly a handout to rich people who can pay off a house (or inherited one).
savingsPossible 1y ago
not rental tax. Rental tax on the house you own, if you live in it At least according to phind https://www.phind.com/search/cmg40zr9i00002a6lqddmuyxt https://www.phind.com/search/cmg40zr9i00002a6lqddmuyxt I suppose that would count as a progressive tax (as opposed to regressive, like VAT)
- tomp 1y ago
  It’s actually “imputed rental value tax”. The point is fairness, not progressiveness. The idea is, if you live in your own house, you’re no better off than if you lived in another property and rented out your property, and paid the tax on the rent you get. It’s supposed to reduce friction / bias in the market (though you could also obviously argue the reverse).
  - foogazi 1y ago
    So everyone is a permanent renter ?
    - nothercastle 1y ago
      Yes
  - RhysU 1y ago
    Suppose you buy bread, meat, and cheese and pay sales tax for each of them. You make a sandwich. You eat the sandwich. Do you now owe the government the difference in sales tax on the market price of a pre-assembled sandwich versus on the market price of the individual bread, meat, and cheese? Is it "fair" to owe the government the incremental sandwich sales tax? Should someone who can buy separate bread, meat, and cheese ingredients get such marginal sales tax benefits relative to someone who only can buy pre-made sandwiches? Or does owning the bread, meat, and cheese mean that whatever marginal value you extract from the ingredients' use is fully yours? Supporting imputed rent seems consistent with supporting my hypothetical sandwich marginal sales tax. It's ridiculous.
    - 1y ago
cool_cherry 1y ago
Switzerland is transitioning to online voting, and having a digital ID for authentication is helpful for that. I hope it is used as part of the voting process. My understanding is that the current approach for e-voting in Switzerland works with voters being sent a PIN in the mail [1]. Then the voter uses the PIN to log into the system and vote. Unfortunately that means that insecurely discarded letters from non-voters could be used to cast votes on behalf of these voters. Some jurisdictions try to use a second factor to prevent these attacks. In Ontario, for example, many municipalities use a combination of the voter's PIN in the mail + the voter's date of birth. But a date of birth isn't really secret. Lots of people know your date of birth (especially insiders at organizations that collect this data), and it may appear in data breaches or even publicly on social media. If you're curious about this, I recently co-authored a paper which is all about security problems relating to online voting credentials in Ontario -- It's relevant to the Swiss case as well: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-05036-6_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-05036-6_... Long story short, using a digital ID to authenticate to the system (like Estonia does) goes a long way to mitigate this authentication problem. However, there are still plenty of other potential risks with online voting that are unrelated to authentication (how do you prevent ballot stuffing, clientside-vote-altering malware, falsified counts, etc). And there may be privacy risks with digital ID depending on the practical implementation. [1] https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-government/digitization-solutions/e-voting/security-given-top-priority#tamper-proof_voting https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digit...
- elric 1y ago
  How do any of these schemes ensure that votes can't be traced back to individuals? Secrecy is an important part of voting.
  - cool_cherry 1y ago
    Different systems have different approaches. If you're a voter, you can use your web browser's developer tools to see what's going on, and part of my research is essentially doing that with systems like this. With one Ontario online voting system used by dozens of municipalities, your choice is sent via a form submission (POST) to the server. The POST contains your choice in its body (in plain text) and your browser also sends a cookie/authorization header which contains a token which was generated by the server and given to the client when the client logged in with the PIN/birthday. In that case, the online voting system could identify you and who you voted for at the time the request is made (they receive both the authorization token linked to your identity and the vote in the same request). The vendors then takes procedural steps to then separate you from your vote, and the elections authority running the election receives a report of the totals (but not who each voter voted for) from the vendor. However, other systems are a bit more complicated. They'll serve you client-side javascript which does cryptography with your PIN / voting choice such that you can prove to the server you are authorized and made a valid vote, but the server can't link your vote to your identity. Then there's a lot of stuff that happens to mix votes together before they are unsealed and counted. I'm not a cryptographer, so I can't give you the best explanation off the dome. The Swiss system does try to do something that looks like the latter approach, and they hire cryptographers and security professionals (and have public testing) to ensure the system's design meets requirements for ballot secrecy and if the implementation is correct. There's a video about how ballot secrecy is ensured with the Swiss system which you can watch at this link: https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-government/digitization-solutions/e-voting/security-given-top-priority#tamper-proof_voting https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digit...
lqet 1y ago
For those unfamiliar with this "rental tax": If you own a house in Switzerland, the tax office assumes that you are your own landlord and rent your house to yourself. It estimates the fictitious rent you charge yourself, and you have to pay income tax on it. The Swiss German name for this estimated rent is "Eigenmietwert" ("self-rental value") and this is what will now be abolished. What makes this strange tax even more absurd: as you are your own landlord, your property interest rate becomes a business expense of your hypothetical rental company. So you can deduct your property interest from this income tax on the fictitious rent you pay yourself. In effect, it is unattractive to fully repay your mortgage (you just leave enough debt to avoid the income tax), and Switzerland has the highest household debt in the world. By a large margin [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
- OptionOfT 1y ago
  I'm Belgium this rental tax is the same. You're taxed on the hypothetical rent income. But... this is based on values of either in the 90s, or 70s. I remember because the hypothetical income (on a yearly basis) for our 2016 new build was €1,200. Remember, income, not profit. You couldn't rent a place within 5 miles that was below €1,000 per month.
- vinni2 1y ago
  Sounds like it’s an indirect property tax.
- Anon1096 1y ago
  > The Swiss German name for this estimated rent is "Eigenmietwert" ("self-rental value") In English this is called imputed rent, it's used in US for CPI calculations.
- jorvi 1y ago
  > "Eigenmietwert" It is not that absurd, we have the same in The Netherlands (eigenwoningforfait). And yes, we also have the property interest deduction, we literally call it mortgage interest deduction (hypotheekrenteaftrek, HRA). They reason this is done is because it allows tax systems to tax main residencies differently from regular real estate tax measures, which is usually in the wealth section of tax policy. It stems from the 1890s in The Netherlands, I assume it'll be around the same era for Switzerland and Germany. And for other readers, yes it is as terrible a tax policy as it sounds. It is highly regressive, favoring home owners over renters, and the more expensive your house the bigger the deduction. In The Netherlands the current election cycle has it as one of the subpoints of our housing crisis, and it seems the battle won't even be about if it should be abolished, but rather if the timeline should be 30, 15, or 8 years.
yonran 1y ago
A sad development. At least in the US, the fact that rent is taxable income to the landlord but imputed rent is untaxed is a regressive tax break for property owners (and was apparently a mistake of the original Form 1040; see Lawrence Zelenak, “The Early Income Tax and the Imputed Rental Income of Homeowners” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108377157.008 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108377157.008). I wonder what convinced majority-renter Swiss voters to enact such a tax break?
- kgwgk 1y ago
  Wages are taxable income to workers but imputed wages are untaxed. That’s a regressive tax break for people who cook their own food and care for their own children.
  - nothercastle 1y ago
    lol but it’s true. The less productive stuff you do outside the formal economy the more value you get to keep. That’s why digital cash is so problematic
  - yonran 1y ago
    The difference is that you’re comparing labor income (making your own dinner) to rental income from land (imputed rent). Poor people tend to not own property, whereas poor people do tend to make their own meals, so I doubt your claim that taxing home meals would be equally progressive.

72 points by YakBizzarro 1y ago

There’s nothing inherently wrong with e-ID, it can be mighty useful, especially when implemented thoughtfully. The real problem is when it’s imposed despite widespread societal opposition and refusal (which obviously is not the issue here, but is in other countries).

Lukas_Skywalker 1y ago
I agree that it can be useful, but I fear that in the future, we will have many more online platforms that require an ID than we currently do. In the past, things like age verification required users to upload a scan or photo, and someone had to verify it. Because that was too much work for the platform operators, they didn't do it (or only with the banner "Are you over 18?"). With the e-ID instead, this will be much simpler to implement. And I expect it to become much more widespread in the future.
- traspler 1y ago
  Even though I am for the eID I do share your worry but I don‘t think it‘s hopeless. Both politically and socially there are avenues to combat such over-identification. Still, most uses will probably more private than sharing copies of your ID so I am not sure what the gain for companies will be as it might just limit the customer base without much data gained. That does not seem in the interest of those companies. It‘s easier for the government to enforce certain checks, which is also not ideal but still there are avenues to fight this if it happens.
- dbrgn 1y ago
  Quite a few actually do require ID-scan-through-email (which is horrible). Or, they simply delegate to a third party video ident service, often in another country (because cheaper). How exactly is the status quo not much worse than "I give you a cryptographic hash proving that I am over 18, but nothing else, and without the state knowing that this transaction happened"?
  - Lukas_Skywalker 1y ago
    The status quo is that companies which are required by law to have this information (banks, telecommunication providers etc) do require an ID scan (and often video identification as well). All the others don't really care and just let you register with whatever name and birthdate you want, because the ID scan method is too cumbersome and expensive to them. I expect those to move to eID, effectively requiring people to have an eID, with no way to provide false information.
miohtama 1y ago
Indian Aadhaar has some examples discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41608810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41608810
tehjoker 1y ago
The inherently wrong part about it is that it is extremely easy to revoke at the push of a button, vs a physical card that must be physically confiscated.
Arwill 1y ago
I hate that everything is being pushed onto the phone. Its a single point of failure.

mrob 1y ago

Unlike the proposed UK digital ID (which is not a "card"), this one is optional. Nobody is being forced to buy a smartphone and accept Apple or Google's terms of service.

crimsoneer 1y ago
But the Swiss already have a unique digital identifier for everyone living and working in Switzerland (your AVS number I think?) so it's really not optional, and is the primary purpose of the new UK id. The actual application itself is much of a muchness. Also, the UK gov has already said there will be solutions for old people/time travellers/the Amish etc without phones. Nobody is going to force anybody to buy a phone.
- mrob 1y ago
  AFAIK, the UK gov has only said there will be solutions for people unable to use a phone, not people unwilling to use a phone.
  - crimsoneer 1y ago
    " As part of our consultation, we will be making sure the scheme is inclusive by considering: - physical alternatives are available for those without smartphones " From https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-id-scheme-explainer/digital-id-scheme-explainer?utm_source=chatgpt.com#how-we-will-ensure-it-is-available-to-everyone https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-id-scheme...
- kgwgk 1y ago
  >the Swiss already have a unique digital identifier Digital as in being a sequence of thirteen digits?
pheggs 1y ago
Define optional? There will be new checks introduced online where you can only enter if you have an E-ID. Companies do have to accept a physical card as well, but only if you appear physically at the companies doors. Otherwise, that statement was kind of deceptive in my opinion because there will be a lot of pressure to get one. They also decided to make it free, which shows they probably want to achieve a high adoption.

ivell 1y ago

Swiss e-ID is self sovereign and built on open protocols. https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch

pheggs 1y ago
I like that it is open source, I don't like that they use SD-JWT tokens which contain hashes of people's names for things like age verification.
- taminka 1y ago
  why is that bad?
  - Sayrus 1y ago
    I'm guessing you'd want to separate age verification from identity verification. A hash of your name is as good as your name since you don't change name and you provide both to certain providers, or it can be bruteforced.
    - pheggs 1y ago
      It's a bit better than that, you really have to get access to the disclosure because the hash also contains a salt. But it's a needless risk
- grothoff 1y ago
  It's only partially open source. Some server-side code remains proprietary, and the client-side will depend on proprietary code of Google and Apple and they do not plan to support platforms that are actually Free Software. The law overall is badly written. For example, articles 12 and 26 effectively say that "The source is shared with public, except if it is proprietary or insecure." Or take Article 4: "The government may operate systems that protect the privacy of the identity subjects."
  - 1y ago

mulmen 1y ago

Abolishing rental tax is huge. What does that do for affordability?

benbojangles 1y ago
makes swiss landlords richer. Foreign nationals cannot own rental homes.
- DougN7 1y ago
  Can you go into more detail?
  - config_yml 1y ago
    This only affects homeowners who live in their own property, not landlords. If you earn rent on your property, you will still pay income tax on it.
- grothoff 1y ago
  Not quite. If you reside in Switzerland, you can own rental homes. Just foreign non-residents cannot buy.
- YakBizzarro 1y ago
  Not at all, it depends on the residence permit. With a C permit you can buy and rent properties, while with B you can buy only your own home
m101 1y ago
The price of houses has just gone up because they have removed a real estate tax. Simple, and short sighted. The taxes need to be raised from somewhere so now let's see what convoluted and complex schemes they come up with to do that.
brainwad 1y ago
Not much. They are moving from a regime where owner-occupier mortgage interest is deductible but you have to pay income tax on the imputed rental value of your owner-occupied home, to one where you don't pay the tax but also can't take the deduction. For most Swiss people, who rent, it doesn't directly affect them. And even for most owner-occupiers, they never pay off their mortgages, and so the two effects currently cancel out. It's mostly a handout to rich people who can pay off a house (or inherited one).

savingsPossible 1y ago

not rental tax. Rental tax on the house you own, if you live in it At least according to phind https://www.phind.com/search/cmg40zr9i00002a6lqddmuyxt https://www.phind.com/search/cmg40zr9i00002a6lqddmuyxt I suppose that would count as a progressive tax (as opposed to regressive, like VAT)

tomp 1y ago
It’s actually “imputed rental value tax”. The point is fairness, not progressiveness. The idea is, if you live in your own house, you’re no better off than if you lived in another property and rented out your property, and paid the tax on the rent you get. It’s supposed to reduce friction / bias in the market (though you could also obviously argue the reverse).
- foogazi 1y ago
  So everyone is a permanent renter ?
  - nothercastle 1y ago
    Yes
- RhysU 1y ago
  Suppose you buy bread, meat, and cheese and pay sales tax for each of them. You make a sandwich. You eat the sandwich. Do you now owe the government the difference in sales tax on the market price of a pre-assembled sandwich versus on the market price of the individual bread, meat, and cheese? Is it "fair" to owe the government the incremental sandwich sales tax? Should someone who can buy separate bread, meat, and cheese ingredients get such marginal sales tax benefits relative to someone who only can buy pre-made sandwiches? Or does owning the bread, meat, and cheese mean that whatever marginal value you extract from the ingredients' use is fully yours? Supporting imputed rent seems consistent with supporting my hypothetical sandwich marginal sales tax. It's ridiculous.
  - 1y ago

cool_cherry 1y ago

Switzerland is transitioning to online voting, and having a digital ID for authentication is helpful for that. I hope it is used as part of the voting process. My understanding is that the current approach for e-voting in Switzerland works with voters being sent a PIN in the mail [1]. Then the voter uses the PIN to log into the system and vote. Unfortunately that means that insecurely discarded letters from non-voters could be used to cast votes on behalf of these voters. Some jurisdictions try to use a second factor to prevent these attacks. In Ontario, for example, many municipalities use a combination of the voter's PIN in the mail + the voter's date of birth. But a date of birth isn't really secret. Lots of people know your date of birth (especially insiders at organizations that collect this data), and it may appear in data breaches or even publicly on social media. If you're curious about this, I recently co-authored a paper which is all about security problems relating to online voting credentials in Ontario -- It's relevant to the Swiss case as well: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-05036-6_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-05036-6_... Long story short, using a digital ID to authenticate to the system (like Estonia does) goes a long way to mitigate this authentication problem. However, there are still plenty of other potential risks with online voting that are unrelated to authentication (how do you prevent ballot stuffing, clientside-vote-altering malware, falsified counts, etc). And there may be privacy risks with digital ID depending on the practical implementation. [1] https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-government/digitization-solutions/e-voting/security-given-top-priority#tamper-proof_voting https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digit...

elric 1y ago
How do any of these schemes ensure that votes can't be traced back to individuals? Secrecy is an important part of voting.
- cool_cherry 1y ago
  Different systems have different approaches. If you're a voter, you can use your web browser's developer tools to see what's going on, and part of my research is essentially doing that with systems like this. With one Ontario online voting system used by dozens of municipalities, your choice is sent via a form submission (POST) to the server. The POST contains your choice in its body (in plain text) and your browser also sends a cookie/authorization header which contains a token which was generated by the server and given to the client when the client logged in with the PIN/birthday. In that case, the online voting system could identify you and who you voted for at the time the request is made (they receive both the authorization token linked to your identity and the vote in the same request). The vendors then takes procedural steps to then separate you from your vote, and the elections authority running the election receives a report of the totals (but not who each voter voted for) from the vendor. However, other systems are a bit more complicated. They'll serve you client-side javascript which does cryptography with your PIN / voting choice such that you can prove to the server you are authorized and made a valid vote, but the server can't link your vote to your identity. Then there's a lot of stuff that happens to mix votes together before they are unsealed and counted. I'm not a cryptographer, so I can't give you the best explanation off the dome. The Swiss system does try to do something that looks like the latter approach, and they hire cryptographers and security professionals (and have public testing) to ensure the system's design meets requirements for ballot secrecy and if the implementation is correct. There's a video about how ballot secrecy is ensured with the Swiss system which you can watch at this link: https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-government/digitization-solutions/e-voting/security-given-top-priority#tamper-proof_voting https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digit...

lqet 1y ago

For those unfamiliar with this "rental tax": If you own a house in Switzerland, the tax office assumes that you are your own landlord and rent your house to yourself. It estimates the fictitious rent you charge yourself, and you have to pay income tax on it. The Swiss German name for this estimated rent is "Eigenmietwert" ("self-rental value") and this is what will now be abolished. What makes this strange tax even more absurd: as you are your own landlord, your property interest rate becomes a business expense of your hypothetical rental company. So you can deduct your property interest from this income tax on the fictitious rent you pay yourself. In effect, it is unattractive to fully repay your mortgage (you just leave enough debt to avoid the income tax), and Switzerland has the highest household debt in the world. By a large margin [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

OptionOfT 1y ago
I'm Belgium this rental tax is the same. You're taxed on the hypothetical rent income. But... this is based on values of either in the 90s, or 70s. I remember because the hypothetical income (on a yearly basis) for our 2016 new build was €1,200. Remember, income, not profit. You couldn't rent a place within 5 miles that was below €1,000 per month.
vinni2 1y ago
Sounds like it’s an indirect property tax.
Anon1096 1y ago
> The Swiss German name for this estimated rent is "Eigenmietwert" ("self-rental value") In English this is called imputed rent, it's used in US for CPI calculations.
jorvi 1y ago
> "Eigenmietwert" It is not that absurd, we have the same in The Netherlands (eigenwoningforfait). And yes, we also have the property interest deduction, we literally call it mortgage interest deduction (hypotheekrenteaftrek, HRA). They reason this is done is because it allows tax systems to tax main residencies differently from regular real estate tax measures, which is usually in the wealth section of tax policy. It stems from the 1890s in The Netherlands, I assume it'll be around the same era for Switzerland and Germany. And for other readers, yes it is as terrible a tax policy as it sounds. It is highly regressive, favoring home owners over renters, and the more expensive your house the bigger the deduction. In The Netherlands the current election cycle has it as one of the subpoints of our housing crisis, and it seems the battle won't even be about if it should be abolished, but rather if the timeline should be 30, 15, or 8 years.

yonran 1y ago

A sad development. At least in the US, the fact that rent is taxable income to the landlord but imputed rent is untaxed is a regressive tax break for property owners (and was apparently a mistake of the original Form 1040; see Lawrence Zelenak, “The Early Income Tax and the Imputed Rental Income of Homeowners” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108377157.008 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108377157.008). I wonder what convinced majority-renter Swiss voters to enact such a tax break?

kgwgk 1y ago
Wages are taxable income to workers but imputed wages are untaxed. That’s a regressive tax break for people who cook their own food and care for their own children.
- nothercastle 1y ago
  lol but it’s true. The less productive stuff you do outside the formal economy the more value you get to keep. That’s why digital cash is so problematic
- yonran 1y ago
  The difference is that you’re comparing labor income (making your own dinner) to rental income from land (imputed rent). Poor people tend to not own property, whereas poor people do tend to make their own meals, so I doubt your claim that taxing home meals would be equally progressive.