Taxation is not "taking things from people". Everyone benefits from the public services Taxes fund, even the super wealthy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?