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Comment by fooster | Hacker News Reader

The rub here is the definition of rich.

Yep. Rich can mean a lot of things. In Norway the wealth tax starts applying at about $150K USD of assets, which is a very low threshold. The pattern I see across countries is that over time the tax rates keep increasing and the thresholds at which apply keep coming down. And that is because governments are badly mismanaged most of the time and they rely on a tax base Ponzi scheme. When your tax base isn’t growing you have to extract more from the existing one. Rarely is efficiency or waste talked about.

> The pattern I see across countries is that over time the tax rates keep increasing and the thresholds at which apply keep coming down. And that is because governments are badly mismanaged most of the time

Sort of, but it goes back to the overwhelming size of government budgets. In the US for example, even if all of the assets of the wealthiest individuals could be converted 1:1 into cash (it can’t) and the government took 100% of it, congratulations, we’ve fully funded the government for perhaps one year. There’s nowhere to go at that point except to revise the definition of “rich.”

Yup, In the Netherlands the de facto wealth tax starts applying at €58k of assets (to be lowered to €51 next year), with exemptions for primary residence, pensions and bank savings.

It started off at 1.2% about 2 decades ago (legislated as a 30% rate on a deemed 4% return), but has increased to 2.1% last year (36% rate on deemed 5.88% return), and in the current government budget proposal is set to increase to 2.8% next year (36% rate on deemed 7.78% return).

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