What did the Irish government do to entitle itself to a chunk of the appreciation of your equity portfolio of presumably non-Irish companies? What did they do to contribute to that equity growth?

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derriz 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t understand the question.

Governments collect tax in lots of different ways: income taxes, sales/consumption taxes, import taxes, capital gain taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, etc,

What’s so special about capital gains taxes that requires the government to have had some sort of active involvement to be justified?

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spwa4 6 days ago | parent [-]

Capital gains are theoretical. You do not have that as money, but the state does want it as money. They are not what someone paid for your assets, they are what someone THINKS someone else might pay. Most smaller companies cannot be sold easily, and of course, the government is unwilling to take that as the valuation being zero (because what someone is willing to pay right now is in fact zero). And the government is unwilling to take any risk (they take cash only). So they're taxing money you do not have available to spend, and may not have at all.

Think of it as taking a $10k diamond with you. It's worth something, but ... maybe next year artificial diamonds double the size of your diamond start costing $500, and your diamond's value goes to $550. The difficulty is that the government demands "10%", which is $1000 in taxes on the "value" of your diamond now.

So for a big range of company sizes it's effectively a tax on nonexistent assets. This would not be the case for a huge (let's say revenue of 500k or more) company.

But the government chooses not to tax those big companies.

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Wobbles42 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Perhaps the simple solution is to give those small business owners the option of selling their business to the government at whatever price the government feels it is worth.

Any claim of valuation is really only meaningful as a purchase offer.

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FredPret 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Or, and hear me out here, we cut state spending to sustainable levels so the government doesn’t have to regard us as walking dollar signs

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spwa4 6 days ago | parent [-]

The problem is that the government is financed by a ponzi scheme based on selling very steep GDP growth, very steep increases in the labor force. In other words, the German government as it functions today is financed by having sold the increased income in labor taxation of the next 10 to 30 years to the banks so they could spend it already. Only ... that income doesn't exist.

The labor force is shrinking (especially if you look at it in terms of how many hours of labor are performed, irrespective of who does it, or when). In other words, the German government has sold the labors of Germans for about the next 15-25 years ... and Germans aren't able to actually do the work that has already been sold. Someone is about to get very badly burnt, and so there is a big fight who takes the loss. The government has the guns, doesn't want to pay, in fact they want big companies to keep delivering their goods. So those government guns will be aimed ... at workers. The only ones they can be aimed at without BIG consequences for the people with the guns.

So, now, under current taxation, the government has to more than triple any increases in taxation, which they need to just maintain current services. Once to pay for what the government needs. Once to pay back the principle of the loans they already made. Once to cover the interest on those loans (because 20 years loans on average at about 3%, let's say total interest coast over the length of the loan is about 100%). And on top of that they have to add what they need to pay extra due to labor force shrinking. In other words, elected representatives are going to find that they both have to do A LOT extra in new taxes for any initiatives and even if they raise taxes the effect of that will not nearly be what they expect.

And taxation on labor is already essentially 50%, so obviously percentage increases are going to be incredibly unpopular. Plus there's the additional difficulty that the problem is not money. It is that the very real assets behind money (ie. work, performed by a human) are becoming scarcer, while the drain on those resources (the welfare state, ie. old people) is increasing.

For the next 20 years, minimum (the time it takes to go from newborn to productive citizen), the government has to shrink the services they provide, at least in terms of labor. And since people aren't about to have another baby boom, it's going to be longer. Oh, and I would much appreciate if the German government managed to do this without putting the Nazis back in power.

And this is a worldwide phenomenon, modified by immigration and modified by a few years depending on the exact country, so you can bet your firstborn quite a few parties are going to get elected on the message "we'll just steal it from our neighbors militarily", like the Palestinians are doing. But this approach is on the cusp of becoming really, really popular worldwide. So it's not really that Trump is causing 100 wars worldwide, it's having a totally unsustainable system: either people need to be accept a lot less than they currently have, or they can go to war and make it FAR worse. Needless to say, it is a certainty they'll want to go to war.

And btw, as I pointed out, this is not a money problem. It is a problem of labor resources. It is about the amount of labor, not the division. So every system has the same problem: nothing can be solved by switching from/to capitalism, socialism, fascism, communism, ... as no system is able to create labor, only redivide who labors and who gets the rewards. None of these systems increase the amount of labor and so the welfare state is doomed under every system.

TLDR: the government has to spend about 50% less per 20 years. Not in terms of money, but in terms of actual people working for government (including hospitals, schools, eldery homes, ...). 50% of government jobs have to disappear for every 20 years this lasts, and at least once.

You would think this would make the government invest a massive amount in AI and robotics, anything required, in the last years they can maintain spending without extreme pain. But, of course, nothing remotely like that is happening.

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FredPret 6 days ago | parent [-]

The real problem is a social contract that was sold to people long ago without any secure funding source.

Now those social services (free healthcare, retirement benefits) are baked into entire populations' expectations and life planning. Give it 20-30 years, then these services can neither be provided nor paid for.

Our only real hope is tech progress unlocks much faster economic growth, even with dwindling numbers of people.

	▲	Workaccount2 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Despite tech and AI being pretty much the only lifeline Europe has to get itself out of the pit it dug (population collapse while simultaneously promising the world to retirees), they are still strangling the nascent tech scene. In 30 years are we going to have a European economy that is entirely dependent on foreign AI and robots to prop up a society of old people?

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spwa4 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So you want to implement taxation by having the government offer money to people? I understand the sentiment "money where your mouth is", but ... seems unlikely to be very useful to keep government spending up.

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Uvix 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Capital gains aren't theoretical. A capital gains tax is levied when gains are realized by selling an asset. (e.g. I receive a dividend on a stock, or I sell a stock or my house for more than I paid for it.)

I think you're confusing a capital gains tax with a wealth or asset tax.

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dandellion 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, other than give access the infrastructure, the people and the rule of law... what did the romans ever do for us?

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_petronius 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you lived in Ireland in that period, you benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads, bought things in shops, so and on so forth.

Regardless, the idea that the government can only tax you if it directly gave you sufficient benefit, _in your assessment_, is of course nonsense. Taxes are what you owe to the society you live in, not about what society owes to you.

If you are lucky enough to be internationally mobile, this does not exempt you from contributing to the communities you spend time in as you travel around the world. You cannot expect to arrive in a country, earn money from it, and depart again without paying your fair share of taxes.

If you do not like how a country has structured its tax law and what priorities it has as a society, you are of course always free to not move there in the first place.

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robocat 6 days ago | parent [-]

> benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads

That is a terrible basis for argument: we mostly each get similar usage of services (roads, police, yadda yadda) which should be an argument for a fixed amount of tax per person (a poll tax).

If you wish to argue that we get what we pay for: then rich people pay wayyyyyy more so they should get more government services???

The wealthy surely don't get better policing: instead the wealthy pay heaps for their own insurance and security systems.

Be careful making any argument based on services received for money spent because the well off pay a lot and don't receive a lot for it.

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Wobbles42 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. The entire concept of property becomes pretty meaningless without some very basic concepts of a legal system and territorial integrity. Without that you can only own what you can physically defend.

Wealthy people and large companies do generally employ security, but that is merely supplemental. They enjoy the backdrop of a society where the vast majority of people at least recognize the basic concept of ownership, and where protection from external state actors is provided. More to the point, they live in a system where most people see negative expected return from just killing them and taking their stuff

Abstractions like insurance further require a system where agreements can be made and mostly enforced, and where the need for the insurance is low enough for the premium to be workable.

The small security team at any given company is there to handle the the exceptions that don't conform to the larger society's rules. It doesn't replace that protection entirely. You'd need a standing army for that, and you'd have to work full time just to maintain its loyalty.

Even with no direct services whatsoever, people benefit from society in more or less direct proportion to their wealth -- and arguably the benefit accrues exponentially as wealth increases, given that this enables the exponential growth of capital.

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robocat 6 days ago | parent [-]

> Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place.

What a pointless argument - you could just as easily chose cause and effect in the other direction: without businesses then society has nothing. Zero businesses, zero tax income.

My main point is that society needs to encourage business owners. If marginal tax is too high, then owners have no incentivise to earn themselves an extra dollar. When owners earn less then society gets less.

There's a balance to incentives.

I'm not working currently because my taxation rate is too high. I'm fine with that since I value my time highly. However financially my country could be getting more from me by lowering my taxes enough to encourage me to work. But voters don't care about what is sensible - they care about optics - and politicians care about voters more than they care about the economy.

	▲	psd1 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I find this softer position much more amenable than your GP comment. However, you conflate "businesses" with "entities that pay only some minimal poll tax". It turns out that progressive tax does not preclude complex society. Corporate tax does not kill business on touch. All you've argued for is the existence of the Laffer Curve. Commercial activity predates currency, and is omnipresent across every tax system that has ever been tried. Where money, there trade. Where trade, there value-add. Or at the very least, combing the beach for pretty shells. There are tribes without the concept of personal property or money, that make things and build value. No tax can extinguish human creativity. I'm cagey about secondary effects, but I'm cautiously optimistic about debasing the trait of self-enrichment. I see no reason to take on faith that people acting out of self-actualisation would build a lesser technology. You know you're on a site full of nerds, right? The existence of the internet protocols is a case in point. Conversely, I prefer a world without facebook and robocalls.

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psd1 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> The wealthy surely don't get better policing

_Surely not._

> rich people pay wayyyyyy more

Citation needed

> so they should get more government services

...such as corporate welfare, political influence, favourable prices on public land and institutions, regulatory capture?

The acid test for your frame is whether you would have made as much wealth on a desert island, with no market, no value-added inputs, no communication and no currency. If so, then great, you truly did not depend on society. I admire your self-reliance.

Otherwise, you have benefited from the sum effort of every human, living or dead, in the chain of causality leading up to the circumstances in which you made your pile. I'll leave natural resources aside.

I _love_ that a bunch of libertarians are seasteading. More should go. I am happy to write off tax debt for anybody who goes seasteading for, let's say, five years.

If your raft calls into port for trade, then you pay duty and sales tax, but at that point you've admitted defeat. It's not like they'll accept your raftcoin anyway.

	▲	6 days ago \| parent [-]
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