- cross-posted to:
- news@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- news@hexbear.net
The German chancellor has called for a welfare reform, putting him on course for a possible clash with the SPD.
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Then how about stopping welfare for millionaires?
Or stop subsiding e.g. plane fuel. Better for the environment anyway.
Merz is predictable and a traitor to the German people. He will usher in the fascist power grab through conservative policies - the AFD will grow in popularity as conservatives protect the 1%.
Die Linke’s tax plan would have paid for the yearly debt of the government and then some; their secret - tax the wealthy.
We can afford all of our costs, we can improve society, we can provide a thriving economy for all Germans if we simply tax the ultra wealthy out of existence. No one should have a billion euro net worth, nor 100 million nor 50 million. No one need own 3 houses while others go without even a flat.
We have enough wealth in this country, it’s just in the hands of the hoarders. Don’t look towards conservatives or the right for change, look towards those that address the root problem!
IMO the borders need to be closed first before taxing the rich works well enough. Allow me to explain:
If you tax the rich today, they drop the german citizenship and become carribean citizens tomorrow, and then you can’t tax them anymore. All the while they hold on to their companies in germany.
Instead, it has to be illegal to invest inside germany (above a certain threshold amount) if you don’t have german citizenship. This way, the rich can’t flee. They have to keep german citizenship to hold on to their companies, and then they can be taxed.
Although I appreciate the thought here, and I think the investment idea may even be good regardless of what I’m about to say, that’s not exactly how this works. If you tax the assets the rich own, where they own them, it doesn’t matter where they go. And they can’t live in Germany and not get taxed, so they can change citizenship all they want if they live here they will get taxed here. And based off of the most recent studies/reports I’ve seen (but not read) rich don’t actually move when taxes go up - which makes sense. People have lives, family, friends, favorite restaurants and hobby spaces.
The rich will try to dodge the taxes, they may even succeed but we don’t have to legistate a bullet proof solution we just have to agree:
- the rich need to be heavily taxed (I’d even say out of existence)
- taxing the rich is possible via various methods
- taxing the rich would solve and/or reverse most of societies problems so everyone should talk and support it.
But yes, I’m a big fan of no outside investment. I’m also a fan of government investment requiring ownership purchases. I’m also a fan of requiring companies to be partially or totally owned by their workers. And I don’t think anyone should have a net worth over let’s say 50 million.
So you’re saying the assets (factory, houses, land) should be taxed directly, instead of the billionaires?
Interesting idea, i need to think about it.
Edit: after having thought about it, i’d like there to be a “exempt tax amount”, i.e. if you own less than $10m, you don’t pay any wealth taxes. if you do taxation solely on a per-asset basis, that’d be difficult. It would be better if the person gets taxed and not the asset itself. Sothat you can deduct a tax-exempt amount per person, not per asset.
I mean if the billionaires own the houses and factories and land it’s the same thing right?
After having thought about it, i’d like there to be a “exempt tax amount”, i.e. if you own less than $10m, you don’t pay any wealth taxes.
- if you do taxation solely on a per-asset basis, that’d be difficult.
- It would be better if the person gets taxed and not the asset itself. Sothat you can deduct a tax-exempt amount per person, not per asset.
does that make sense to you?
That makes sense. My point isn’t to tax the property it’s that the property is taxed, if that makes any sense. You tax based on the property, it traces to the owner, the owner gets taxed based on the property. If the owner lives in Beijing or Antarctica the property is still here and gets taxed, they can’t avoid it by moving unless they can take the property.
So in that case, an exempt amount is fine. I’d just want it to be steep up to a point where it’s 98 or 100%.
No one gets a third house before everyone gets one kinda thing. And also no one is allowed to have enough wealth they can destabilize democracy or even a city.
Semi-related, my ideal taxation plan looks like this:
When doing new, big projects, it makes sense to try them out on a small scale, then see how it goes and scale it up later. For an initial set of parameters, i propose the following:
Assume you live in country CNTRY.
- If you own less than the tax-exempt amount, you pay no wealth taxes at all. The tax-exempt amount is $10m.
- If you’re a citizen of country CNTRY, no matter where you live, your total wealth gets calculated, and you have to pay wealth tax on everything above the tax-exempt amount to the country CNTRY. The tax rate is 3% annually. E.g. if you own $25m, the tax-exempt amount is $10m, and the non-exempt amount is $15m, so you pay $450k annually.
- If you’re not a citizen of CNTRY, there is no tax-exempt amount for you and you have to start paying wealth tax on everything you own inside CNTRY. This is to avoid tax-avoidance schemes, like people investing in other countries to avoid paying taxes in their own countries. E.g. a person owning $250m might invest in 25 different countries, where in each of them the tax-exempt amount is $10m, sothat they don’t pay taxes in any of the countries.
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… without finally taking the upper ten percent into the taxpaying fold.
Always has been. “We cannot afford x any more” has been their standard argument for dismantling social security and lining up their own pockets for decades now.
They should probably be executed for breaking the country’s welfare systems.
it could easily , just slim down the government , remove tax waste and more. a city near me just bought 32 benches at the cost of 70k€ EACH yes 70.000 why ? end of quarter they didnt want to get budget cuts the next quarter. some citizens found very similiar benches from another company ( like minimal different same material ) for 3,5k EACH 3500 each or many of the million graves of taxes , we have in my city multiple “Autobahn” which arent used but were built and need maintenance why ?
Our Government makes home owners pay for street repairs in full and more , where does our tax money go?
just slim down the government
It’s an easy thing to say, but even with the waste and bloat the government function itself is just a few percent of the expense. Pensions, health, education and child support are the vast majority of expenses. Remove the money from government, tack in on to pensions and you kicked the can down the road for another few years. After that the pension and health costs increases and eats up the extra money due to ageing of the population. Now you’re back at square 1 but with a lot less people in government to keep things together.
You can’t use immigrants to work jobs and pay taxes. It was tried, got a bunch of backlash in the end and by now the right has their campaigns ready to go all out if somebody suggests this. Birth rate is going down so it’ll be rising costs of ageing and no new incomes from new workers. They’re f-ed and know it. We all knew this moment would come, but if somebody suggested saving now for later they got voted out of office so nothing got done.
where does our tax money go?
This is a pretty easy question to answer given that you’re talking about a public institution.
The only difficulty is that the answer is complex and requires reading and understanding many sets of financial reports and accompanying minutes et cetera.
a city near me just bought 32 benches at the cost of 70k€ EACH
That’s a pretty absurd claim, and simply not how budgets in public institutions work.
Sure there might have been some kind of fuckup so installation of one of 32 benches cost $70k, or any number of other plausible explanations, but large public institutions don’t just throw $2.25m EUR at the end of a quarter as a budget stuffing exercise.
While I couldn’t find the article anymore ( it’s a bit old ) I just found one for 12 for 170 thousand.
Another where they pay 20k for each because they are circular and more.
Tax waste is just all surrounding.
So you’re just making things up based on the vibe.
Exactly nope.
I typically abhor violence but i understand if somebody would kill Merz due to him being a danger to the general population. A politician has to help the people, not hurt them. If he doesn’t fulfill this one basic task, he’s unfit to be a politician. He has to understand that or step back immediately. If he doesn’t, he’s unreasonable and cannot be talked to logically.
Merz is a conservative. They’re all like that.
Its crazy to me that the only left leaning party in Germany was split by internal divisions between neoliberalism and progressive politics. How was that even possible when more than half of Germany’s voters are left leaning?
Are you referring to SPD? They haven’t bothered with actual left-leaning politics for a while. Die Linke is our party on the left, and they are experiencing a renaissance right now, but unfortunately not nearly as much as the far right.
To answer your question: Most German voters are centrists with a mix of vaguely conservative and social democratic views. And they’ve been exposed to economic anxiety narratives and xenophobic fear-mongering for the past two decades, while lacking the political education to smell the populist bullshit for what it is in a social media environment defined by anti-intellectualism and fake news.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/germany2025
Spd is a right leaning party no I’m talking about die linke
Edit: oops bsw is a russian support operation not a neoliberal party. I apologize for that mistake
Fuck bsw. The split is the opposite of a problem, it was desperately necessary and the catalyst for the Linke renaissance that I mentioned.
I am an outsider who only lived there a long time ago but it looks to me like the party was highjacked by neoliberals in order to split the vote. As far as I can tell German intelligence should have cracked down on both bsw and afd as soon as evidence emerged that they were part of a russian influence campaign. However the neoliberals instead ignored bsw’s russian support… this seems to be an obvious attempt to split leftist parties in half. Die linke is one of the last remaining leftist parties in the g7 outside of france. italy’s m5s is the other. And these parties seem to be losing to the right because the neoliberals sabotage them at every opportunity
I’m not sure how to make this any clearer: Die Linke is doing so much better both internally and in the polls / results since the fucks from BSW split off that I called it a renaissance twice now. And it was desperately necessary. BSW does not identify as left. Representatives actively reject the label and refuse to even pay lip service to leftist ideals, because they simply aren’t left. It’s time to let go of the notion this was “splitting the left”.
Who really lost big time are the centrists. FDP, SPD, CDU to various degrees. Greens too but less so. Because xenophobic populism doesn’t work for them nearly as well as it does for the fascists.
I should have recognized your point. Yes you are right. But I believe that the individual politicians inside of cdu csu sdp fdp etc as well as the bureaucrats inside of the state security apparatus believed that not countering russian propaganda would cleave the left and this may have backfired. Because it is strange that they outed afd as an obvious russian front but not bsw. Ex posto facto reasoning on my part but the other expla ation for the lack of action is that the German intelligence service truly believes that bsw is not a russian front or they think there’s nothing illegal about russia operating a fake politician party.
But again I’m a foreigner who doesn’t understand the German political system.
Im the usa though they did the same thing when they uncovered a russian influence campaign. They looked the other way and let it all go down (for the most part)
He’s not “conservative”, he isn’t conserving anything. He isn’t conserving the living standard of the people. He’s just a dumbass posing as a conservative, while actually wreaking havoc on our collective future.
That’s conservationists that conserve things. Conservatives work to consolidate power, reinstate kings. Like Donald and the conservative republicans.
What if the homeless and poor go to war for your rich ass?
Then there’s plenty of money for the weapons. So maybe buy less of that and more shelter, clothes, food and education?
Friedrich Merz is Germany’s Kier Starmer and if you don’t understand what i mean go check on UK and how well they are doing under Starmers government and you’ll understand.
You mean it is now?
For starters, cancel the fucking F-35 order and tell Rheinmetall’s lobbyists and investors to shove it.
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Tax wealth not work!
They will just move to the next country.
Always threatened, but never happens.
So they all live in low tax countries? No? Ok.
If they want to operate in the world’s 3rd largest economy, they will not.
A wealthy country’s market for selling goods has value that can’t be taken elsewhere. But production, jobs, and profit can absolutely be exported. We have a lot of problems from not operating as one globe and the way businesses can flee from one country to another to find the most favorable conditions to exploit is one of those problems.
Then you set up an exit tax and a tax on citizens living abroad
Not a solution as this will hurt people who aren’t billionaires as well.
With fair tax brackets it shouldn’t matter much
They own assets. Take away those assets, they lose their “leverage”.
They probably will at first. But they will want to come back. And billionaires really don’t like not getting what they want, even if it costs them more than they want to get it. You don’t need to be the lowest bidder to get billionaires. They won’t all go live in Bermuda or LA forever. What good is their money if it doesn’t let them live wherever they want? You already have all the things you need to attract them. Culture, history, prestige, safety. You will have even more of al those things when you make them pay their share.
surprisingly good video.
yeah, exactly what i’m saying, real assets (houses, agricultural areas, factories) are local and cannot be moved to other places easily, so they can be taxed. tax the rich.
Let them. If they don’t pay their share, they are not worth keeping.
Here’s the list.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germans_by_net_worth
COUNTRY welfare state can no longer be supported
Change COUNTRY for any west European country and this has been said while it CAN be supported but the rich want to get more rich
… without the rich paying their share.
