wish the EU was half as focused on promoting economic growth as they are on taking things from people
> And they don't pay much for it Not true
> (in percentage terms definitely). Why would it matter?
I don't want to live in a dystopia with _untouchable_ hyper wealth individuals so I believe that governments should make it very hard to stay a billionaire and virtually impossible for people to inherit that level of generational wealth from their family.
I am very keen for levels of taxation (and the closing of all the loopholes) that would force billionaires to liquidate significant percentages of their assets to pay taxes as I think it will encourage them to work a bit harder. After all if they managed to become a billionaire once they must be very clever, right?
Even almost all their "assets" are stocks in the companies they created? Would the idea be that the founders of these companies should lose control over them?
The suggested wealth tax is 2%. I have no concerns that a billionaire capable of creating a multi billion dollar business would have any issues raising $20 million per year to sort out their tax bill.
Are there any billionaires you're worried about in particular?
That is somewhat debatable. Not all taxes go to universally popular public services. Special interest lobbies are strong everywhere, so you always end up funding a bunch of rent seekers.
This is the eternal problem of the public purse, not that different between modern democracies and eunuchs of the Ming dynasty: someone's else's money gets stolen a lot.
Edit: note that many countries would fit the description; at least I know the Flemish are complaining their taxes burning up for nothing in Wallonia and Madrid/Barcelona complaining their taxes disappearing for nothing in Andalusia etc, West Germany in East Germany, but I guess every country has this issue at least at some level.
I think you can easily see from the replies to my comment however that this sentiment is widely shared across europe, which is indeed reflective of the fact that our economic malaise and lack of policy to address it is an EU wide phenomenon
If this is a subject that you think is important then make an effort.
Citation needed.
Anecdotally there are articles such as https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=89&furtherNews=ye... claiming that "half of Europeans support higher taxes" although in the breakdown it also counts taxes paid by others, which is of course easier to support as an individual. But I also can't find a source claiming that Europeans are "widely" unhappy with the taxes they paid and what they get in return.
Obviously HN users are not representative of the wider population, because of a bias towards higher-income brackets.
The wealth of the wealthy depend a lot on the infrastructure build from tax money. E.g. they don't build nation-scale road networks, but would make much less profit if these were absent.
Of course it's taking things from people. You might say that it's worth it, but that's nothing to do with the mechanism.
Having worked with the public sector a bit, it's incredible how much money is constantly wasted. You see public services and think all the money is spent efficiently on them, when it's just constantly spent on everything. £20k meetings to decide whether or not to spend £10k. Making sure your budget is always fully spent so you can get the same next year, even if you don't need it now and won't need it next year. Every day in every department in every government, multiple people's whole lifetime of taxation is wasted.
The mentality is totally different when your customers go to jail for not paying you.
Public sector waste comes out of all our pockets and could have been allocated to welfare, teacher salaries or infrastructure.
The regular claims "taxes stop x,y & x" be it risk taking, R&D, investments or whatever, don't seem to actually have much consistent evidence. It's yet another economics theory, most of which are more opinion than proven rules.
What seems to make the biggest difference is the stability of markets and perceived benefit. When tax rates are consistent or even declining, risk taking & investments drops when the economy is uncertain. If a company thinks there's money to be made, they're not going to sit back and do nothing based on if the tax they pay on that is 23% or 25%.
No, their customers' money went on value received, not on internal projects. However you're not entirely wrong: they're spending money that could go on salaries, lower prices, or shareholder dividends.
Thus they have three incentives not to waste, as if they do it too much a competitor will beat them.
The public sector doesn't have this incentive, as it can just lock people in a box if they don't pay it money.
Private companies come with safeguards: competition and the need for profitability (which is just sustainability anyway). When the natural balancing forces of the market are skewed, obviously inefficiencies will arise and people will pay the price for this.
Imagine Switzerland bordered Russia... would they spend more or less on national defence? Does that mean that the EU is subsidising the defence budget of the country with the highest average wealth?
I agree with you that the economies of most EU countries cannot sustain US military spending levels.
My theory is that since the rich people in those EU countries are amassing wealth at a faster level than the economy is growing then we should use some of that growing wealth to ensure that the economy (and country) are properly defended. Also use the funds for education and infrastructure.
It turns out the US can learn from history and other countries when they see a model that suits them.
Usually the saying is: "If the damned government would just get out of the way and we had unfettered capitalism we would have enormous growth".
The issue with Capitalism (as many economists will tell you) is that it causes monopolies, in fact the game monopoly was designed to teach exactly this.
Growth is not by-in-itself a good thing for most people, it typically is because wealth generally gets distributed a bit; however countries like the UK (which is a rich country by most metrics) has a lower QoL for a common person than Estonia does despite Estonia only having a fraction of GDP per capita relative to the UK.
Wealth naturally centralises in a closed capitalist system; regulation is the only force that stymies that.
If wealth is too concentrated then growth is meaningless to the majority.
No private monopoly is forever, whether it's the Hudson's Bay Company, the East India Company, GM, Kodak, IBM, you name it. All those empires fell because eventually there will be more innovative offers from lighters, more agile competitors. Government monopolies are much harder to get rid of.
Your same statements could be reflected inward of course: British empire, the several thousand peaceful transfers of power that come and go without fanfare and of course very violent revolutions that pass with very significant fanfare and attention.
A seated government, especially a democratically elected one should be capable of serving the needs of people, however governments are made of people and the smaller the government is the easier it is to buy it off. - The smaller the government, the easier the corruption. (which is why "small government" capitalists always end up embroiled in corruption scandals eventually).
A good example of this is denoted "the keys to power" in the easy to understand video essay by CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
But after watching the money-printing and inflation of the last few years, maybe the numbers really can keep on rising forever even if meaningful economic activity doesn't increase.