Norway's lesson on wealth taxes: let some millionaires go | Hacker News Reader

Norway's lesson on wealth taxes: let some millionaires go

reuters.com

11 pointssaubeidl6 comments

The wealth tax is mostly and envy tax, it does not increase total tax revenue and leads to people do overinvest in property (house and cabin) to reduce the taxable wealth. For people starting a business you have to move if you get VC money as you have to pay tax on unrealized gains.

The Ministry of Finance has calculated that expatriates took NOK 142 billion in deferred income out of the country in 2022 and 2023. Given the current tax rate of 38 percent, this means that we will lose more than NOK 50 billion in tax if we are unable to get them back home before 2027. On the other hand, we lose around NOK 0.77 billion in tax each year because expatriates are exempt from the high and uniquely Norwegian wealth tax. https://www.nhh.no/nhh-bulletin/artikkelarkiv/2025/april/lyt...

The wealth tax increase has lead to less total tax income due to the income tax not being paid to Norway any longer.

As usual the upper middle class pays most of the wealth tax, 12% of the population paid wealth tax. If you have wealth beyond 170.000$ (1.76 million NOK) you pay 1% of the amount above. Private home and second house (cabin) has reduced value. Average salary in Norway is around 700.000 NOK.

This directly contradicts the article:

> Revenue from it has climbed despite the exodus and now sits at 0.6% of GDP — not a trivial sum. For context, Britain’s Labour government is hunting for savings of a similar magnitude to help hit its fiscal targets.

> Private home and second house (cabin) has reduced value.

That sounds like a desirable result? Housing costs are out of control.

Before you introduce a wealth tax you have to introduce a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax. That is the lesson.

Previous discussion (15 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037487

Why did Norway scrap inheritance tax in 2014? That seems pretty unfair for people who can‘t count on a big inheritance as start capital.

„In my opinion, the latter argument would be an interesting topic for further studies, in particular whether the abolishment of the inheritance tax gives certain groups of Norwegian youths with prospects of high inheritance, advancement of inheritance and gifts a false security, in a reality where young people need to understand the relation between hard work and wealth.“

See https://novaworkboard.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/the-abolishme...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com