Rich Germans demand higher taxes | Hacker News Reader

Rich Germans demand higher taxes

news.bbc.co.uk

24 pointssbt26 comments

Rich Americans believe they should be taxed higher as well.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/05/04/business/econwatch/e...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=ap3I...

Signatory Peter Vollmer told AFP news agency he was supporting the proposal because he had inherited "a lot of money I do not need".

Um yeah, because a guy who doesn't work for a living knows a lot about sound economic policy...

I'm not entirely certain that "working for a living" and "understands economics" are meaningfully correlated. "Working for a living" and "being able to understand the basic concept of fiscal policy", maybe, but full-blown economic policy is something rather different.

So he would be better educated if you took away his money?

Isn't that kind of his point?

That's more of an argument for an estate tax than a tax on the rich in general.

I'd have to check my dad's portfolio before I could take a principled position on this issue.

An article from a German periodical that covers the same topic can be found at http://www.sueddeutsche.de/finanzen/492/491855/text/

It says a considerable amount more than the BBC article at the expense of not being in English. I read German, and I can personally attest to the machine translation (at least from Google) being sane.

I always find it interesting that people who have extra money won't just donate to the government. Instead, they advocate the government take it from them and from others. It's not a coherent position.

It is a coherent position: they only want to give up their money if enough other people do as well to accomplish their goals. It's a classic public goods problem, if you assume they feel that everyone would be better off with the additional government funding.

"they only want to give up their money if enough other people do as well to accomplish their goals" -- fair enough. No need for them to resort to force though.

I don't understand how you could've possibly come to this conclusion. The net effect of one rich dude donating money to his government is not the same as the net effect of all rich dudes being taxed. So there's no logical contradiction.

It's a good thing - like the elder brothers taking care of their younger siblings. If one does take the effort all of the elders should do it - IMHO it's a position of consistency. We don't talk about the younger ones being lazy or such, just simply about the elder ones taking care when they younger ones need help.

In this case, he is demanding that it be taken from those who had the temerity to earn it to further the political goals of those who did not.

And EUR 500,000 is hardly a "fortune" - that's about GBP 400,000 which is the price of an ordinary family home in the South-East of England, or the price of a two-bedroom flat in central London. So effectively, this is an upper-class heir to a family fortune advocating higher taxation on the middle-classes and professionals.

How much do you want to bet that the people proposing this are worth at least one or two orders of magnitude more than EUR 500,000. To quote from the article "The group say they have more money than they need", and very few people with a net worth of just above eur 500,000 fall into that category.

44 people have signed a partition to propose a tax law that will negatively affect 2.2 million people, am I the only person who sees something very odd with that. This is nothing but a bullshit PR move by some rich heirs to try to buy some good will.

this headline should read: fringe group of 44 wealthy germans demand higher taxes, strangely making the news.

the rest of the country opted to kick out the socialists from government in recent national elections, replacing them with a libertarian party running on a tax cut platform.

I'm not from Germany, but the CDU is decidedly not a libertarian party. It's conservative center-right. You don't really have an equivalent of this in the US.

I think he referred to FDP, which replaced the SPD.

Currently, Germany has a coalition of CDU + SPD which will become a coalition of CDU + FDP.

And the FDP is not really libertarian. We should call them liberal, but in the old, European sense of the word --- not in the American sense, where it just means socialist.

(Anyway, every party in Germany is a socialdemocratic party in some sense.)

The FDP (free democratic party) had its best showing at a federal election ever, with around 15% of the vote. (So did the socialist party with around 12% or so.)

Actually libertarian is pretty close to the right translation for the FDP since the word liberal has been redefined in English to mean the political left (though not socialist, which in the US has also been redefined to Marxist-Leninist). Libertarianism, in American English, is closer to a classical laissez faire liberalism which the FDP proclaims.

(Note: I'm an American that's been living in Germany for the last 7.5 years.)

OK. I thought libertarian meant more or less Anarcho-Capitalist, which the FDP aren't. I guess the FDP is pretty close to the Economist on most issues.

That may be somewhat confused by the fact that a lot of internet libertarians do tend towards anarcho-capitalism, but the Libertarian Party in the US is pretty close to the FDP.

That's right. In US we have establishment-Red and establishment-Blue: a 1 bit political space.

If you had a proportional voting system, you'd probably get more parties. (Parties with a chance to get someone elected.)

I don't know if that's good or not. Germany uses a strange in-between system, and it also has a threshold, i.e. you need 5% of the votes (or alternatively win three districts) to get into parliament.

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/hrm/browse_110.html

If you review that list, you'll note that where the rubber meets the ground (rules of operations) there is a huge body of governing rules that are extra-constitutional and developed over the course of the past couple of hundred years by the two establishment parties.

As an analogy, consider supplying independently developed applications for a platform with a proprietary OS where the OS vendor has a vested interest in keeping independents out (or ineffective).

And even before reaching the forum, the non establishment entities must dance to the tune orchestrated by (you guessed it) the establishment:

http://www.fec.gov/members/members.shtml

Its a chicken and egg problem. We need a Supreme Court that can review and strike down faulty laws enacted by the entrenched interests to revise the system. But to get to the Supreme Court, the candidate needs to be nominated by the establishment President and approved by the establishment Congress.

To be accurate, your summation should read: "this headline should read: fringe group of 44 wealthy Germans demand higher taxes on German people deemed wealthy for a period of 2 years, strangely making the news."

"the rest of the country opted to kick out the socialists from government in recent national elections, replacing them with a libertarian party running on a tax cut platform"

The rest of the country was not a target of their demand. In fact, it was the rest of the country they want to help with their own money.

Those 44 people could own 50% of Germany. In America, the fringe group that is the top 1% owns 90% of the wealth, gets lots of subsidies from our Government and still pays less tax as a percentage than the other 99% of poorer Americans.

This is an article about politics, which means it is probably not suitable for this site.

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