301–310 of 567 posts
One of the basic principals of the EU is freedom of movement between countries. One could argue that imposing such an onerous tax on moving to another EU country breaks this principal, so maybe worth a legal challenge - for someone with a lot to loose.
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Kinda makes it harder to attract foreign talent to Norwegian startups as it could affect their decision moving to Norway. While I think the number of people affected is exaggerated, the most well-known case would be the Dune Analytics founder who had to pay more in tax than his salary and was forced to either take a loan to pay taxes (no guarantee the company would succeed) or move out of the country.
This, and barnevernet has reputation similar to gestapo in East Europe.
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> benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads That is a terrible basis for argument: we mostly each get similar usage of services (roads, police, yadda yadda) which should be an argument for a fixed amount of tax per person (a poll tax). If you wish to argue that we get what we pay for: then rich people pay wayyyyyy more so…
Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. The entire concept of property becomes pretty meaningless without some very basic concepts of a legal system and territorial integrity. Without that you can only own what you can physically defend. Wealthy people and large companies do generally employ security, but that is merely supplemental. They enjoy the backdrop of a society where the vast majo…
What a pointless argument - you could just as easily chose cause and effect in the other direction: without businesses then society has nothing. Zero businesses, zero tax income.
My main point is that society needs to encourage business owners. If marginal tax is too high, then owners have no incentivise to earn themselves an extra dollar. When owners earn less then society gets less.
There's a balance to incentives.
I'm not working currently because my taxation rate is too high. I'm fine with that since I value my time highly. However financially my country could be getting more from me by lowering my taxes enough to encourage me to work. But voters don't care about what is sensible - they care about optics - and politicians care about voters more than they care about the economy.
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I don’t understand the question. Governments collect tax in lots of different ways: income taxes, sales/consumption taxes, import taxes, capital gain taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, etc, What’s so special about capital gains taxes that requires the government to have had some sort of active involvement to be justified?
Capital gains are theoretical. You do not have that as money, but the state does want it as money. They are not what someone paid for your assets, they are what someone THINKS someone else might pay. Most smaller companies cannot be sold easily, and of course, the government is unwilling to take that as the valuation being zero (because what someone is willing to pay right now is in fact zero). And the government is…
Any claim of valuation is really only meaningful as a purchase offer.
The developed world is increasingly facing a funding crisis brought on by this propaganda that if we tax corporations and the very wealthy then they'll leave. One of the most farcical examples of this is the decades-long race to the bottom on business taxes and incentives between Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas. For the non-Americans out there, this is basically one city but it sits at the border of two…
If "businesses will leave" was propaganda, you wouldn't need an exit tax, would you? If there is an exit tax because companies would leave otherwise, why would someone rational start a new company in the country rather than leave first?
- Charge exit taxes on people who "leave". As someone else pointed out, the US already does this with citizens who renounce citizenship (and it applies to long term permanent residents too);
- A lot of assets simply can't leave. Physical assets, land, etc;
- Assets and corporations can be nationalized;
- You can use tariffs and other legislative methods to punish those companies that "leave";
- You can also just deny access to a market for pretty much any reason you want. For example, Huawei is heavily restricted in use in American telecoms infrastructure for "national security" reasons; and
- You can generally impose cvarious levels of capital controls to limit the inflows and outflows of capital in pretty much any way you want. China does this heavily.
China is often criticized because the companies are an extension of the state. That's true. They are. But what we have instead is governments that are extensions of corporations. Can we really say that's working out better?
The US economy is rapidly becoming Russia. Russia has autocratic rule with oligarchs who pay fealty to Putin. In return they can do whatever they want. Do you really think we're different at this point?
Compare that to China. China isn't afraid to "disappear" their billionaires for awhile to bring them into line aka Jack Ma [1]. Exactly where he went and why and what happened is still unclear. China continues to crack down on tax evasion by so called "yin and yang" contracts (eg [2]). And China executed two for a scandal involing tainted baby formula [3].
What do we get? A world where governments can't punish companies for offshoring because that violates "free trade". Companies can take governments to a WTO court. And have.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56448688
[2]: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202403/1309137.shtml
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
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That's not what the exit tax is, though. The German exit tax is effectively just a way to give the existing capital gains tax a way to tax unrealized gains when you leave the country, to prevent you from dodging taxes on capital gains by simply leaving the country. In other words, it's not an additional claim. It's simply an enforcement mechanism for the money you already hypothetically owe.
Yes, that's true, but the implementation is.. not very elegant. In theory, the exit tax should ensure that Germany gets the taxes of the sale of your company. So, if you ever sold your company once you're no longer in Germany, Germany wouldn't get those taxes, so it charges you immediately once you leave Germany in a sort-of "virtual" sale. This, of course, sucks tremendously because you actually haven't sold your co…
That being said, I'm not entirely sure that's the case here, and this is often also brought up in the context of strengthening the inheritance tax in Germany. In both the inheritance tax and the exit tax, the inherent applicability conditions are such that the end result is that there simply aren't that many people in a situation where it actually has a measurable impact. For the exit tax, you'd need to find people who 1. want to leave Germany, 2. already started a company here, 3. that company grew large enough that the Wegzugssteuer would really be a burden, and 4. that don't have enough liquidity, or cannot raise enough liquidity by selling some of their ownership, to cover the tax. That ends up being a really small number of people, which always eases questions about the reasonability (Angemessenheit) of the law. And in the context of inheritance tax, there's the added point that there's a floor to its application.
As another commenter mentioned, even for those situations where the exit tax actually is burdensome, just as with inheritance tax, there are two really simple solutions: first, create a floor for the minimum valuation by which the exit tax is actually assessed, and second, allow you to "sell" shares to the German government as a means of paying the tax, turning the Finanzamt into a silent shareholder in the company. I think both of these would be substantial improvements to both the German exit tax and inheritance tax.
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This needs to be repeated more often. If I buy a house for $100k, and next year some idiot pays $1M for a very similar house three streets down, did I just magically make $900k? Should I be taxed on that gain immediately? Should I be forced to sell part of my property to cover it? What happens when that sale occurs at a much lower price, due to my need to liquidate, did that lower the prices of all the houses in the…
> did I just magically make $900k? Yes you did, because now you can mortgage your real estate for that value and live in luxury. This is how most people make a good living, not by working or investing.
I know this is a very common technique that people use to effectively liquidate assets without incurring taxes, but I think it can (and should be!) solved without penalizing people who simply hold an asset.