Posted on 06/26/2023 6:14:16 AM PDT by george76
Everything old is new again. This happened in Sweden in the 1970s and continued into the early 1990s. Wealthy Swedes had to plan their escape because if they just left, the tax authority would come after them in their new countries. So they had to set up offshore trusts in places like Luxembourg years ahead of leaving and put all their wealth into the trusts. Sweden finally wised up and stopped. Norway apparently didn’t learn that lesson and took up what didn’t work for the Swedes.
They forgot to ban people from leaving the country and moving their money
The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Because stupidity and ignorance are contagious diseases of a Liberal mind.
We always copy the worst policies from other countries.
The Netherlands had this policy also. A friend of mine’s dad lost everything to the wealth tax. He was a retired machinist living modestly, but the wealth tax slowly eroded all of his savings leaving him broke. My friend came to the USA to escape this fate.
We all live in feudal societies. The names of kings and lords are replaced by parliaments and tax collectors.
Great Britain faced the same issue in the 1970’s during the “Brain Drain”. People fled to the Jersey Islands to take advantage of a loophole. The Brits closed the loophole and both human and financial capital left Great Britain altogether.
I did my dissertation research in England for 2 months in 1969. I became friends with a chemist (what we call pharmacist) and he was debating whether to buy his 5th store. He said that, if he did, it would put him into the Supertax bracket. As I recall, that kicked in on incomes of £30,000 and above. The pound was roughly $2.40 back then and on each pound over that amount, the gov’t took $2.38. He didn’t buy the store because it just wasn’t worth it. Tax policies distort the natural allocation of resources, often to less productive endeavors.
They still have not recovered.
Two words: Laffer Curve.
Likely so has Prince Harry...
Still wondering if he’s here on a visa that allows the Harkles to dodge income taxes...
It is impossible to productively tax wealth. Income, yes, real estate or tangible property, yes, consumption, yes, but wealth that can be converted into fungible money, will always be spirited away from the reach of the tax collector.
And corporations do not pay taxes. They collect them from their customers, clients, and patrons as a cost of doing business, and pass them through as part of the value of the goods and services they sell.
Which is why Commiefornia wants to charge refugees and exit tax.....kinda like the Nazis did with fleeing Jews.
“ They forgot to ban people from leaving the country and moving their money”
Bit of history, that’s exactly what the Nazis did to my grandparents.
They could leave, but had to leave everything behind as a special exit tax.
Leftists just being leftists.
Wealth tax equations, as believed by the left-thinking government officials, has only 2 sides to the equation:
Taxing the wealthy = more tax revenue for government to spend
While in reality...
Taxing the wealthy = more money leaving the country (or states) = less tax revenue for government to spend
Liberals don[t want to admit that the second part of the equation results in destroying their -tax-the-wealthy policies.
Another major fault with the tax-the-wealthy policy is...
when the wealthy have less money to spend or take it elsewhere, there will be fewer jobs creating activities, meaning that, even less tax revenue is generated, because, there will be fewer tax-payers.
It is said, and accurately, that liberalism is a mental disease. That’s easily demonstrated by policies that result in the opposite of what liberals intended.
Flight of the golden geese
No, the lunatics aren’t paying attention. They only make decision based on whether the subject sounds like a good idea. The fact that the ideas don’t work doesn’t deter them a bit.
The Norwegian government didn’t do the math:
(1) If it costs less to leave the country than the tax bill, people will leave almost every time.
(2) Since the rich spend money much more effectively than Governments do, there’s a double tax loss for the Government.
Leftist greed has no limits.
Norway has had huge taxes on income for decades.
So when the Leftists add a wealth tax in 2021 is just another move by them for the government to own everything.
The incremental cost of making a change to your living arrangements or your tax domocile is minuscule when you have lots of money. This is why the rich so easily make rules for the rest of us to follow... they are not impacted by these rules. The cost to them is either zero or very little.
Kings should never be king.
Møøse bites can be veri nasti.
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