Germany's Left Party wants to halve billionaires' wealth
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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
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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
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The French have invented a marvelous tool for that. It leaves the wealthy a bit lightheaded.
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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.
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Treating the symptom and not the problem IMO.
Invest in worker co-ops that are equally owned by the workers instead.
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Some bootlicker mod removed my comment
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i was talking about the quote rather than you yourself
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Yeah, and they were right about it
Cut them horizontally, and they'll agonize until they die from blood loss. And there's so many ways to botch a vertical cut, what with all those solid bones like the skull or the pelvis...
A sharp guillotine blade right on the neck is the tried-and-tested humane way to deal with the owners
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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.
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Or just seize anything above a billion, the number of billionaires are now zero.
Redistribute seized assets and poverty is eliminated.
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A >working< law that doesent break the constitution. Thats the point.
And in my humble opinion: Its bad to promise things to people that wont happen and cant be realised. Or short: Its bad to lie. -
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?
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A mathematically true statement within an error margin of 0.2% (if symetrical, 0.1% if not).
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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, don't live in Germany, barelly speak the language and don't follow German news), just pointing out that plenty of places have such mechanisms to provide the appearence of independence whilst constraining their "independence" to just balancing reporting of 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 (i.e. when one sides says "something happenned" it's reported as "something happenned", when the source is the other side it's reported as "side says something happenned").
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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.
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No I say a law thats works as promised would be (imho) against the constitution
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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.
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Please find some source to corroborate that beyond "(imho)". I already removed your previous comment for misinfo.
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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.
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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.
