German welfare state 'can no longer be financed' — Merz – DW – 08/23/2025
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The German chancellor has called for a welfare reform, putting him on course for a possible clash with the SPD.

The German chancellor has called for a welfare reform, putting him on course for a possible clash with the SPD.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      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?

      • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago

        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.

        • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1·
          3 hours ago

          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.