Germany's Left Party wants to halve billionaires' wealth
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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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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.
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Stop, you’re being too sensible.
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I don't know what you said, but I'm pretty sure I was going to make the same joke.
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And if after that, they still have a billion, half it again. Etc.
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You’re not wrong, but let’s not pretend that stock valuation formulas or discounted cash flow methods are anything but tools to justify hoarding wealth. Billionaires don’t just “mainly have stock”—they weaponize it, leveraging loopholes and tax havens while the rest of us debate theoretical equity.
This isn’t about complexity; it’s about complicity. The system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed: to protect capital at all costs. Meanwhile, the average person is drowning in bureaucracy just trying to keep their head above water.
And borrowing from your own company? Sure, if you’re part of the elite club that can afford to play that game. For everyone else, it’s crumbs and austerity. Let’s stop normalizing this absurd disparity.
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Die Linken, die Linken,
Die treibens,
Bis sie stinken! -
Yes, the value of potential future profits as reflected by high stock prices would indeed be hard to evaluate.
But assets, outstanding claims, in part even intellectual property? Companies already have to keep track of those. -
Look, the bilionaires will always have ways to get out to pay the least amount of tax possible. There is almost no way to combat that because they have the money to setup a company in another country and setup structures to pay less.
You can however get more income tax from the companies below that. The medium to large sized companies with millions of profit. But it is not feasible to do a taxation for every company every year, it is impossible. There aren't enough people working in the fields who would be responsible for those reports. (evaluators, accountants, etc.). Evaluating a company generally costs 10-20k minimum.
Idk how it is in other countries, but yeah it's more like bureaucrazy than bureaucracy here in NL. So you want to add even more bureaucracy into the entire structure?
There are other ways of stopping businesses from abusing the system and governments are working to help fix the issue. But evaluating companies is just not gonna be a good structure for it. It's way to subjective and in general wealth tax has been shut down by legal systems. Like here in NL, the legal system shut down the previous box 3 wealth system because it was against human rights. And the government and legal system are more separated here in NL than in say something like the US.Also a lot of small business owners do take loans from their own companies (if it is something like a BV/Ltd). Sometimes we talk over a couple thousand, sometimes it's a couple 100k and sometime's it;s one or more millions and I mainly work with small to medium-sized companies.
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Yeah you can do that, but often companies keep track of the purchase value minus depreciation. Which means that something like a building is on the balance sheet for 1m, but the actual value might be 10m. the equity is basically the assets minus the liabilities which should be the value. However, paying dividend to the shareholder will lower the equity, but it will earn the shareholders money. So I would see a lot of companies doing that to lower their equity to pay less taxes.
Evaluating intellectual property is also pretty hard to do. Generally it has an original value and you depreciate on it as well.
All of the above depends on the country, the size and type of company it is, but generally it is pretty similar. Across the western world.
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Billionaires exploiting tax systems isn’t an inevitability—it’s a failure of governance. Saying “there’s no way to combat it” is just surrendering to the status quo. The resources exist to enforce fair taxation; what’s missing is the political will. Governments prioritize protecting wealth over funding the systems that could hold it accountable.
Claiming wealth taxes are “too subjective” or costly to enforce is a convenient excuse. If we can afford bloated military budgets and corporate bailouts, we can afford evaluators and accountants. Let’s not pretend bureaucracy is the enemy here—it’s the deliberate underfunding of enforcement mechanisms that perpetuates inequality.
And small business owners borrowing from their companies? That’s survival tactics, not privilege. Comparing them to billionaires dodging taxes is disingenuous at best, insulting at worst.
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Look for say 20-30k you can set up a company in a different country with lower tax rates and move your profits there. That's what a lot of companies do to make it so they can pay less taxes. You need multiple countries to cooperate (something the EU is doing on this front, but it takes forever to adapt everything).
It's way easier to tax the millionaires more, they have fewer options to bypass taxes using complicated structures (over multiple countries). I am saying start there, because that will help governments close the gap in their budget.Evaluating anything is subjective, that's why they often do at least two evaluations when a company is being sold. At least here in NL, where we don't spend a lot of the military and the Ukraine war is only 2200 km away. We do buy out farmers to reduce the amount of farmers to lessen the CO2 emissions of our country, but that is beside the point. As I said, our old wealth tax system was shut down because it was unfair. The tax office in NL assumed everybody had a 4% interest on their savings (above 30k) and other assets that fell in that category and that was taxed. Due to the interest being below 4% (or even being negative) people were taxed unfairly. Including a lot of the middle class who already pay a lot of taxes. Finding other people who are willing to work in accountancy or as evaluators are hard to find. I love my job, but a lot of people think it's boring or have other wrong ideas about the job.
At least here in NL and other countries with a social security system that is complicated people mess up when doing their taxes or applying for their social security. I sadly see it way to often even with clients of mine. That's more my point with that the bureaucracy can be to complicated.
You are wrong that every small company or company owner is struggling to survive. Some are yeah, especially once who have had a lot of issues due to COVID and gotten COVID support they need to pay back. Others are making 1 or 2 million profit per year or more. A small company in The Netherlands is a company with below 50 full-time employees, less than 7.5m balance sheet total and less than 15m revenue. This caused these people to pay less taxed percentage-wise than say a working middle-class person and this was easier to do something about.
I would love to see somebody like Musk to pay 99% taxes on every dollar he makes, but I am sceptic that it is feasible and I think we should start with easier stuff. That is more my point.
