And if after that, they still have a billion, half it again. Etc.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
585 points (98.5% liked)
Europe
2187 readers
1042 users here now
News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
Rules (2024-08-30)
- This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
- No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
- Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
- No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.
- Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
- If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
- Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in [email protected]. (They're cool, you should subscribe there too!)
- Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
- No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)
(This list may get expanded when necessary.)
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @[email protected], @[email protected], or @[email protected].
founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
Billionaires hoarding wealth like dragons on gold while society crumbles isn’t a flex—it’s a failure. Die Linke’s plan? Brutal, necessary, and doomed. Measuring illiquid assets? Please. We tax houses and stocks daily—this “complexity” is propaganda to shield oligarchs.
The real issue? A system rigged to protect capital. The 5% threshold? A gatekeeping farce. Even if they breach it, the SPD will fold faster than a wet paper bag, muttering about “pragmatism” while serving neoliberal lapdogs. Revolution dies in committee. But hey—at least they’re trying to light a match in a rainstorm.
Evaluating a publicly traded company is pretty easy. Stock price times the amount of stock = value of company.
However evaluating other forms of companies is a lot harder. Using the same formula is possible (if there is stock) and otherwise you can still look at the equity value, but it will only say so much. Generally looking at future cashflows is a pretty good way of evaluating a company, but there are loads of things you can have discussions about regarding this method (called the discounted cashflow method). There are also others and I have been part of evaluating a company and it's a fair amount of work. So it's not something you can really do on a yearly basis for tax reasons.
There are other things you can do like looking at how much wage the major shareholder has or how much they have lent from their company. Both to themselves and to family/friends. In NL we kinda limit the amount you can loan from your own company.
Luckly for the whole situation most billionaires mainly have stock in publicly traded companies. Either directly or indirectly so that is taxable.
Yes, the value of potential future profits as reflected by high stock prices would indeed be hard to evaluate.
But assets, outstanding claims, in part even intellectual property? Companies already have to keep track of those.
Yeah you can do that, but often companies keep track of the purchase value minus depreciation. Which means that something like a building is on the balance sheet for 1m, but the actual value might be 10m. the equity is basically the assets minus the liabilities which should be the value. However, paying dividend to the shareholder will lower the equity, but it will earn the shareholders money. So I would see a lot of companies doing that to lower their equity to pay less taxes.
Evaluating intellectual property is also pretty hard to do. Generally it has an original value and you depreciate on it as well.
All of the above depends on the country, the size and type of company it is, but generally it is pretty similar. Across the western world.
You’re not wrong, but let’s not pretend that stock valuation formulas or discounted cash flow methods are anything but tools to justify hoarding wealth. Billionaires don’t just “mainly have stock”—they weaponize it, leveraging loopholes and tax havens while the rest of us debate theoretical equity.
This isn’t about complexity; it’s about complicity. The system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed: to protect capital at all costs. Meanwhile, the average person is drowning in bureaucracy just trying to keep their head above water.
And borrowing from your own company? Sure, if you’re part of the elite club that can afford to play that game. For everyone else, it’s crumbs and austerity. Let’s stop normalizing this absurd disparity.
Look, the bilionaires will always have ways to get out to pay the least amount of tax possible. There is almost no way to combat that because they have the money to setup a company in another country and setup structures to pay less.
You can however get more income tax from the companies below that. The medium to large sized companies with millions of profit. But it is not feasible to do a taxation for every company every year, it is impossible. There aren't enough people working in the fields who would be responsible for those reports. (evaluators, accountants, etc.). Evaluating a company generally costs 10-20k minimum.
Idk how it is in other countries, but yeah it's more like bureaucrazy than bureaucracy here in NL. So you want to add even more bureaucracy into the entire structure? There are other ways of stopping businesses from abusing the system and governments are working to help fix the issue. But evaluating companies is just not gonna be a good structure for it. It's way to subjective and in general wealth tax has been shut down by legal systems. Like here in NL, the legal system shut down the previous box 3 wealth system because it was against human rights. And the government and legal system are more separated here in NL than in say something like the US.
Also a lot of small business owners do take loans from their own companies (if it is something like a BV/Ltd). Sometimes we talk over a couple thousand, sometimes it's a couple 100k and sometime's it;s one or more millions and I mainly work with small to medium-sized companies.
How about we halve the billionaires while we are at it?
Or just seize anything above a billion, the number of billionaires are now zero.
Redistribute seized assets and poverty is eliminated.
Stop, you’re being too sensible.
The French have invented a marvelous tool for that. It leaves the wealthy a bit lightheaded.
load more comments
(5 replies)
The biggest challenge with an "owned wealth" tax is how do you actually measure it? It's easy if it's held in cash in a bank, but most billionaire's wealth is is land, property, and how do you measure the value of a Picasso stored in a vault if they can slip the valuator a grand to say it's worthless?
Closing offshore money transfer loopholes, heightened tax on luxury spending (100% VAT on private jets and yachts?), making fines income-based, and treating capital gains the same way as income, are all more achievable.
I'm totally on board with the sentiment though.
Make every time it's used as collateral a taxable event. Prosecute for fraud any valuations that try to dodge tax. Its a very fixable problem.
For those with wealth or income above a certain amount, require that their wealth is assessed annually, not on sale only and capital gains tax is paid each year.
They want
- the creation of a wealth register
- implementation of high wealth tax + inheritance tax
- penalize wealth hiding/capital flight via exit tax and binding taxation to citizenship
Forbes and the rich themselves have no issue assigning net worth.
It's not hard to setup objective parameters that measure wealth in all the forms it can be held.
The idea that it isn't is propaganda
Tax = Purchase Cost × Minimum Wage(Moment of Purchase) ÷ Minimum Wage(Moment Tax is Charged)
You can multiply that all by a magnitude term, depending on the taxation frequency, or to charge more/less.
This is a totally arbitrary formula intended to discourage holding non-cash assets that provide no intrinsic utility, and it incentivises owners to raise the minimum wage.
It isn't hard to come up with these sorts of measures, in fact I bet you the reader have some ideas about how my suggestion can be improved. A team of experts could come up with something much better, and they CAN be enforced (don't believe their lies). You just need to disentangle yourself from notions of rules-based "fairness" that exist to justify & preserve our presently lawless economy, where might makes right.
Why do you think art is used all the time for money laundering? It’s almost impossible to determine how much it’s worth. Well until someone buys it.
Wow is this a bad article, full of half-true side tangents and „they're not gonna make it anyway.“
I wonder if DW and its friends are scared :P
PS. The initiative has been around for a while, is independent to any party: https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/
DW is the german government's international broadcast. It's the only actually state-owned and tax-funded media outlet left in Germany.
Critical voices have risen since the current director general, Peter Limbourg took over. Employees went to The Guardian in 2020 to open up about antisemitic, racist and sexist power structures and cultures of bullying, abuse of power and oppression.
In 2019, the editor-in-chief advertised for Ursula von der Leyen for the EU elections.
Incidentally, Die Linke criticized a new direction of the programs in 2014 right after Limbourg took over in 2013.
So, yeah, DW might not like Die Linke very much.
That’s a fantastic quote. This is how you can still run campaigns today!
load more comments
(3 replies)
Just to add to this. There is a bit of a buffer between DW and the government. That is supervisory board with appointees from the government, the chambers of the parliament and 10 German organizations representing the German public. So it is not like they just follow the orders of the German government. In fact two of the three highest position in DW have been appointed when Merkels conservative government was in power. That explains them being as willing as they are to attack the current German government, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
What makes DW different is that it is directly financed by the German government.
And how would being nominated by Merkel make them in any way tend to be fair and honest when it comes to reporting about the Die Linke?
I've seen this kind of "independent" board of State-funded broadcasters with political appointments in a couple of countries and they just tend to have a pro-Establishment slant: For example, the much vaunted "2 sides" take on everything by the BBC is almost always just the reducing of social and political subjects to the views of the two main political parties - the Tories and New Labour - to quite an extreme level excluding non-mainstream voices unless they're pro-Capital (so, the Greenparty is barelly visible even though they represent millions of voters but UKIP and UK Reform were a lot more visible even before getting a parliamentary presence).
I'm not saying they're not independent (I am not German, only live in Germany for a few months, barelly speak the language and don't follow German news in German media), just pointing out that plenty of places have such mechanisms to provide the appearence of independence whilst constraining their "independence" to just balancing reporting between the viewpoints of the two main parties whilst under-reporting the rest and using the same kind of slant in reporting as we see in the reporting of the Israeli-Genocide when it comes to sources other than the two main parties (i.e. when sources on one side say "something happenned" it's reported as "something happenned", when the source is the other side it's reported as "side says something happenned").
There is a difference between pro establishment and pro government though. In this case Die Linke would probably get away better, if DW would have been pro government, as the only way the current government can remain in power is realisticly to gain more votes and add Die Linke to the governing coalition. Otherwise one of the two governing parties SPD or Greens is likely to be kicked out, as they would govern with the Union.
German public broadcasting is modelled mostly after the BBC, but has quite a lot of impact from the state level, rather then just the federal level.
Also Linke has been in state level government before and have achieved very little. They are not as much out of the establishment as the UK Greens are, despite being of a similar party size.
It is quite likely that we will not make be part of a government, but the plans are there and every person we convince, that this is the way to go is good.
Better than no coverage at all imho. 🤷
Sounds good to me
It's not fair... It should be way more than that.
Yeah, but it not unlikely that "Die Linke" wont get into Parliament because of the "5% Barrier"(A Mechanism that prevents parties from entering the German Parliament, if they are below 5% total votes. There are some complicated exceptions, but basicly this is it). Furthermore many Parties dont want to form a coalation with them and this could be against german constitution ... So this is very unlikely to happen.
They are almost certain to enter because they'll get three or more direct seats. Which isn't complicated at all. Heck there's plenty of CDU voters who'd vote for Gysi. It also doesn't look too bad when it comes to taking the 5% hurdle directly.
Of course, getting into parliament is not the same as getting into government, that would require a miracle.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›