This is misleading. The 49.5% tax in the Netherlands is on income above €75,518. Billionaires rarely make the bulk of their money as income.
We don’t have a capital gains tax, instead there is a tax on capital that’s based on expected return on that capital. It’s about 1% on money in bank account and about 6% on stock and other investments.
Same for Germany. It's income taxes (everything above ~66k/year is 42% taxes and everything above ~277k/year is 45%) no capital gains taxes (they are 25% no matter the amount of capital gains) or asset taxes. Don't know where the 47% are coming from.
Also misleading, the US gives trillions of tax dollars to the wealthy who are paying nothing. Usually it is in corporate welfare, but a couple years ago they were paid directly.
The expected return part is the main tax on billionaires. With capital gain you can hold on forever and never get taxed, and if you die you completely skip capital gains tax with inheritance. Effective tax rate is near zero. This trick obviously only works for people who don't need their invested money, buy and never ever sell.
Compare that to NL's tax. Invested? You pay 6.17% x 32% = 1.97% on your investment account, immediately, no deferral possible, year after year. And the rate went up to 36% in 2024 to reduce passive income's rate advantage over income from work.
Would that mean that if something was not continually growing in value you'd end up paying the value of it in taxes over some amount of years? Does this encourage people to pay the tax value out of the asset or just divest from non appreciating assets? If you paid taxes from the value of the asset I guess it'd be like a series converging to zero over time? Like 6% of 100 is 6, the 6% of 94 is 5.64, 6% of 88.36, vs. paying 6 bucks every year. Slower but sort of an eroding effect - like paying society's subscription fee for how you got the value in the first place!
The NL system which has been working for a while works by saying:
We don't care about your capital gains, you'd just try to game the system, we'll pretend you invest everything into a relatively safe bond scheme, and tax your capital income based on that. Meaning we tax wealth as if it was guaranteed income at 4% interest per year. If you gamble and lose, tough break, you still owe the same taxes, as you are bearing the risk on investments, not us.
Wow, this is just entirely wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.
Sweden has a maximum of around 55% income tax bracket if you're in a municipality with high income tax, but billionaires never are and as such would be taxed probably at most 50% income tax bracket.
This is of course entirely irrelevant because billionaires don't make their money on income. Sweden has fairly low capital gains taxes - 30% on regular accounts, and a special account that taxes the whole account value by a low percentage, which shakes out in average years to even lower taxes on capital. This assumes you even keep your capital in the country, which is a big if.
There's also no inheritance tax, no gift tax and no property tax. Sweden is actually an unusually good place to be a billionaire as far as taxation goes, and a below average place to earn a high salary as far as taxation goes.
57% is the tax on "one-time gains" - bonuses and other such things.
This means that you're probably overpaying on it, but you might also be underpaying on your income taxes (usually ~30% even if you reach the ~50%-tax bracket). Worst case scenario, you've lent some money interest-free to the government that you get back on your tax returns.
Correct, but there are those that would take this as a source of truth and run with it. It's not the smart thing to do, but we already see people doing this sort of behavior on other social media.
We shouldn't enable the problem, even if it's an innocent mistake
Billionaires in Europe "evade" taxes just like every other billionaire. Most of their wealth is assets, which is why their tax rates don't seem right if you don't understand how economics works.
The property tax rate where I'm at is 1.7%, and the appraisal districts WAY undervalue properties. A house will sell for 5 million in the city where I work, and their value on the tax roll is $300,000.
As others have pointed out, this is pretty disingenuous. Some (all?) of the others are quoting marginal tax rates --- and the US stacks up nicely on this front, at least in progressive states: max federal marginal tax rate is 37%, with California having a 14.4% max marginal rate. So apples to apples, the US would be 51.4%.
The problem, obviously, is that nowhere in the world do billionaires make their money through "normal" income.
I think #1 in the EU and some strong place somewhere in the top 5 in Europe. It's gotten SO much worse in the past 10-15 years... And not like it was good before that, to begin with.
The 55% rate is only on wage income (and the real upper tax rate on wages is more like 66% anyway, if you include payroll tax).
Capital gains tax is 30%, and that's only on realized gains AFAIK - which is shockingly close to the base payroll tax (25%).
The hardest taxed people here are the middle class, since they get their income as wages, whilst upper class tax rates are significantly lower, with more of their income being from capital gains.
This means Swedish billionaires work harder than any other billionaires in the world to maintain their status as a billionaire. American billionaires are lazy.
No they don't. They have their special loopholes to evade taxes. Nothing is as black and white. Have a look at Spotify, their profit and how many people they fired.
Exactly. Thanks to those loopholes, The Netherlands is a tax haven, one of the worst on Earth even. Mind you, the government has decreed that it is not so it must be all good eh?
If you're not a billionaire and against this, you're pretty much a moron and if you're thinking one day you'll be a billionaire, you won't be based on your thought process alone.
There's no sensible reason why anyone should have no resistance accumulating that much wealth to themselves. It isn't infinite money for everyone, essentially you're taking it from others. Yes, some fools kind of deserve or are themselves at blame for parting from their own money, but if there are no stops, it doesn't motivate others from making sure they create methods to keep doing this to others. All to gain, nothing to lose.
Oh. Haha I've seen this image a lot but for some reason all the other panels looked familiar to me as part of some movie I'd seen but forgotten about and this one seemed like the odd one out. Turns out they're all from a movie I've ever heard of.