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.
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.
The French have invented a marvelous tool for that. It leaves the wealthy a bit lightheaded.
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Depends… Do the two halves grow back into two billionaires. Is that how they multiply?
Some bootlicker mod removed my comment :(
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That’s fine by me. Just leave me a piece 👍 preferably the bit that contains all the hard work they did to become a billionaire.
If they halve the billionaires wealth then there will be zero billionaires
Actshually… we call them billionaires after their first billion, but many have more than just 1 billion. Btw, until recently I didn’t really knew how different is a billion from a million… For the record, 1M seconds is about 11 days. Meanwhile, 1B seconds is about 31 years. I think this helps to get a sense of the scale.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars
A mathematically true statement within an error margin of 0.2% (if symetrical, 0.1% if not).
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!
anti communist much?
I was posting this because, as was the case with FDR in the US, the burgeois press in Germany deeply despises “die Linke” for the very same reason: they are a threat to the power of organized money.
FDR certainly wasn’t a communist but it seems kinda odd to me how you’d miss the main point of my post, especially given the context of my reply.
“Die Linke” is somewhere in between social-democracy and socialism in terms of economic policy, with party co-leader Jan van Aken going as far as repeatedly expressing his desire to expropriate billionaires. Certainly a breath of fresh air compared to the neoliberal controlled opposition party SPD.
i was talking about the quote rather than you yourself.
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.
Yeah, Well see :X
it’s called Agenda Setting.
Especially because its quite complicated or impossible (imho) to a enact a law that does exactly what they promise by not breaking the constitution: Its just populism and a lie
They are quite aware of the constitution and it’s implications. Complicated, sure, but not impossible. I recommend to listen to van Aken talking about the topic.
Calling it a lie is disingenuous.
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Why do you keep calling it a lie? Their plan is concrete, actionable and reasonable likely to pass the courts. The one-time wealth tax in time of crisis (Vermögensabgabe) is well-grounded in the constitution and has precedent. The year-on-year wealth tax (Vermögenssteuer) also is based on the constitution (Art. 106 GG) and already exists on the books, it’s just permanently suspended because the constitutional court declared it illegal, for the reason that it didn’t treat real estate the same as other wealth. Which can be fixed, if a government wanted to.
Is your problem that it won’t happen because Die Linke overwhelmingly likely won’t be part of the next government?
Its about making it work.
You already know that a lot of the rich people arent paying a lot of taxes, right?
If you want to make it work a intended, you have to break the constitution.
Please find some source to corroborate that beyond “(imho)”. I already removed your previous comment for misinfo.
E.g. while the existing wealth tax law has been ruled unconstitutional, that is only because of a few details in the law. The only reason that the law has never been reformed in a way that is constitutional is that CxU and SPD were always against a reform. I.e. the only reason is that it would hurt large donors.
How? This is about enforcing existing laws. The rich not paying taxes, through legal loopholes and illegal tax fraud, is the exact problem. Your still haven’t explained what about the plan would break the constitution.
You can’t say it’d be against the constituion. That is debatable (and debated, see e.g. Wolfgang Abendroth).
The interpretation of the constitution is subject to powerdynamics as well. And it’s the only smart way to design a constitution if it’s meant to be the everstanding stable foundation of a society. … cause you know, those tend to change
No I say a law thats works as promised would be (imho) against the constitution
Treating the symptom and not the problem IMO.
Invest in worker co-ops that are equally owned by the workers instead.
The US left party too
The USA has a left party? What is it called?
The mythical left leaning USA political party. I heard a long time ago it comes out once every thousands years before quickly crawling back under the rock for whence it came.
