4 ms·

anyone making a non-trivial amount of money profited from public services, infrastructure, and protection paid for by taxes. Ensuring a stable and strong infras

by rtpg 14y ago

anyone making a non-trivial amount of money profited from public services, infrastructure, and protection paid for by taxes. Ensuring a stable and strong infrastructure is in the interests of the rich anyways. Not like the super-rich will see much of a difference in their lifestyles anyways. I understand that there needs to be an incentive, but to act like anyone but maybe wandering barbarians could make a significant amount of money without the help of solid infrastructure is naive.

varjag 14y ago
> Not like the super-rich will see much of a difference in their lifestyles anyways. As a thought experiment, would you approve 75% tax on your income right now? I would assume you do OK by Western standards but not quite rich yet. However even with 25% of your earned money your lifestyle is going to be lavish, say, by sub-Saharan standard of living. Point is, doing good by poor people's standards is not really an aspiration wealthy people have. They have money, their lifestyles are costly. E.g. Depardieu is an avid gourmet, other people collect expensive cars they ride on weekends, yet others plan personal missions to Mars, and so on. Yes we all are indebted to society, but taking most of income away is doing nothing here than killing incentives for big earners, and it's not like the money they stopped earning would suddenly appear among city poor.
- maigret 14y ago
  Count normal tax rate of up to 45% and value added tax of up to 20% for normal workers in many European countries. That's what many engineers do pay, and most are ok with that and would gain nothing by going to Belgium, because Belgium has only nice taxes for rich people.
  - varjag 14y ago
    It's not as bad as it sounds: there is normally a substantial non-taxable base income, and the xx% tax you pay only concerns the amount over it. In most European countries there are also numerous tax deductions: daycare, mortgage interest (in certain countries up to 100%), savings accounts for youths and so on. VAT is a base consumer tax paid by everyone, and shouldn't be lumped together into income tax.

by rtpg 14y ago

varjag 14y ago

> Not like the super-rich will see much of a difference in their lifestyles anyways. As a thought experiment, would you approve 75% tax on your income right now? I would assume you do OK by Western standards but not quite rich yet. However even with 25% of your earned money your lifestyle is going to be lavish, say, by sub-Saharan standard of living. Point is, doing good by poor people's standards is not really an aspiration wealthy people have. They have money, their lifestyles are costly. E.g. Depardieu is an avid gourmet, other people collect expensive cars they ride on weekends, yet others plan personal missions to Mars, and so on. Yes we all are indebted to society, but taking most of income away is doing nothing here than killing incentives for big earners, and it's not like the money they stopped earning would suddenly appear among city poor.

maigret 14y ago
Count normal tax rate of up to 45% and value added tax of up to 20% for normal workers in many European countries. That's what many engineers do pay, and most are ok with that and would gain nothing by going to Belgium, because Belgium has only nice taxes for rich people.
- varjag 14y ago
  It's not as bad as it sounds: there is normally a substantial non-taxable base income, and the xx% tax you pay only concerns the amount over it. In most European countries there are also numerous tax deductions: daycare, mortgage interest (in certain countries up to 100%), savings accounts for youths and so on. VAT is a base consumer tax paid by everyone, and shouldn't be lumped together into income tax.