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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.
...and misleading for Sweden. Our capital gains tax is 30%.
Does that bring in a significant amount of revenue?
If you're taxing unrealized gains, then that would be a very significant revenue source.
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.
Thanks for the info. Good to know.
Sweden has fairly low capital gains taxes - 30% on regular accounts,
That's twice the American rate.
Thanks to fairly recent changes by guess who!
Wait, The Guess Who are in politics now?!
/Old man joke
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.
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.
Wrong.
Those are income taxes for people with high salaries.
No billionaire earns the bulk of their money as taxable income. None of these countries tax billionaires the way the meme implies
No billionaire in Germany pays 47% income tax haha
Meanwhile in Hungary: if you're a large business, you pay less tax by percentage than small businesses and self-employed people.
Isn't Hungary officially the most corrupt country in Europe?
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.
Oh yeah, I'm aware - I had plans to move to Hungary, to get to know my ancestors' homeland. Completely scrapped it and won't even think about visiting until Orbán's head in on a pike and his whole party of cronies is exiled.
UK:
"We hide your billionaires money"
Oh we do that in the US too. Turns out Idaho is a popular global tax haven
What a country. In Sweden they tax the billionaires. In America, billionaires tax you!
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.
We've been giving ours billions more dollars that we took from the plebs so they'll be nice to us
No they've never been nice to us, why do you ask?
blegh who needs free healthcare, education, worker's rights, and social services. i enjoy living check to check like 60% of Americans
I'm personally in favor of land value taxes, externality taxes, and natural resource severance taxes.
Just take everything from the neck up.
For billionaires: there is nothing there.
This means Swedish billionaires work harder than any other billionaires in the world to maintain their status as a billionaire. American billionaires are lazy.
We have a point where progressive taxation reverses and you get a refund
Start the head tax
And somehow there are still lots of loopholes.
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?
One thing is to tax the rich, another thing entirely is to tax what they haven't got "gains" on.