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Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

#91

Post by throwaway0a5e »

varispeed wrote: post #55

The ideas are always around taxing the middle class, the hard working engineers, lawyers, doctors and sold to the masses as taxing "the rich", but in reality the rich never pay as much tax as middle class (as a proportion of income). Tax is often used as an instrument to discourage certain behaviour and this proposal seems to be also hitting engineers, but also people on lower income who for example assemble parts at…

The problem is that there's a subset of the population that thinks taxation is inherently good and blindly goes along with the people who propose taxes for their own benefit and the people who propose taxes as a lossy way to legislate away behaviors they don't like but could never get the support for actually legislating away. The result is a baseline support for even the dumbest taxes that is too damn high. This makes bad policy seem like it has actual support when it's just the mechanism of the policy (taxes) that has support.

Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

#92

Post by LeonB »

varispeed wrote: post #72
silvester23 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article, it says > The tax would be paid for by employers and the income generated would be paid to people who can't do their jobs from home. But somehow nobody in this thread seems to have read that sentence.

Worker always pays all tax. If you get X and pay Y tax and employer also pay Z tax, the reality is that you make X+Y+Z and pay Y+Z of tax, it just happens that Z is attributed to the employer, but it makes no difference. So if the Z increases, then X and Y will decrease or if X and Y stays the same, it only means you are now making more, but the difference goes to the state purse. Now if the increase goes beyond the…

If the employer finds a way not to pay Z - do they give it to you? (No they don’t)

Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

#93

Post by damnencryption »

torben-friis wrote: post #35

This sounds like a horrible idea. Home work improves many peoples mental state, reduces time spent at work (if you count commutes), people's footprint in terms of pollution and allow for the redistribution of people that were clustered in big cities under asfixiating rent/home owning costs. Why on earth would we disincentivize it? >By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at resta…

Someone posted this on HN: https://medium.com/technicity/big-banks-are-at-the-front-cen...

Deutsche Bank placed number one in money laundering.

Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

#95

Post by LeonB »

karolkozub wrote: post #88

Taxes have many purposes, and one of them is incentivizing preferred behaviors. Why should we discourage working from home? Is wasting a significant part of your life commuting to work really that good for the society? It's certainly not for the environment. Also, there are many hidden drawbacks of working from home – it's more socially isolating, the work-life balance suffers, setting up a home office may be costly.…

Working from an office is certainly good for keeping the price of commercial real estate high. And if you’re a bank who loans money to people who buy/build commercial real estate with that money, and then the value of the commercial real estate falls... well you’d be in for a giant world of pain.

If people can’t repay their loans you’re now stuck with something worth a lot less than all that money you gave out. OOPS.

I’ve been wondering what banks are going to do about this one. It’s a long term trend happening much faster than anyone could predict.

Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

#96

Post by 627467 »

So, if I choose to work in the office because I prefer and not because I don't have a choice I still benefit from someone who has no choice but work remotely?

Who pays for bills incurred due to working from home?

I can sort see this being a temporary tax on exceptional circumstances (such as public health crisis that halts work for those non-remote) but the proposal explicitly excludes this.

As a permanent tax this only sounds like a tax to make employees (since self-employed won't be taxed) pay for a hypothetical change in paradigm of how people work. Society has been investing in a model (expensive centralized infrastructure for on-site work) that is become obsolete and to sustain this obsolete model they propose to make employees pay for the transition.

Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

#97

Post by jusssi »

A free market solution would be to make commute time paid (maybe to some reasonable maximum e.g. 1h per direction).

So instead of companies forcing their employees to come to the office so they don't get slapped with a penalty tax, they'd be actively participating in optimizing commutes. And it would similarly support those workers who have no option.

Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

#98

Post by scaryclam »

amf12 wrote: post #38

It argues this is only fair, as those who work from home are saving money and not paying into the system like those who go out to work. By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at restaurants near their places of work, while expensive offices remain virtually empty. This is a terrible argument that just makes a lot of assumptions without also considering the benefits. The main ass…

Also add utility bills to that. Gas, electric and water bills all increase by working from home, and for some their internet connection bills will increase as they have a need for more data and a better connection.

Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

#99

Post by pydry »

LeonB wrote: post #89
pydry wrote: post #48

Might Deutsche Bank be sitting on a non performing commercial real estate portfolio? Alan Sugar (British Trump equivalent) similarly issued a demand for people to "get their asses back in the office" after telling everybody his commercial real estate portfolio wasn't performing: https://www.standard.co.uk/business/lord-sugar-offices-prope... https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/03/lord-alan-sugar-calls-on-gove...

I came here to say that it was about commercial real estate incentives and glad to see someone pointed it out. Seems like the obvious reason why someone would suggest such an otherwise ludicrous idea, backed up by such fallacious reasoning. It’s a bit of an insult that they believe anyone would fall for it.

I'm a little surprised at the number of people analyzing this idea at face value rather than wondering what their motivation was for coming up with such a bizarre idea in the first place.
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