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Read about the subsidies and help for start-ups the govt plus the Nordic Association plus the EU handout. You can call it what you want, but when a govt official sits in on negotiations to buy the assets of a start-up and has an apoplectic shock when only mid 6 figures are offered when millions have been sunk, something is seriously wrong. The entire Nordic economies are screwed. There has not been an innovative company since Nokia.
Most estimates says its $1.5 Billion in tax evasion each year. Out of $142 Billion collected. Or 1%
Most of that is done by handymen, carpenters, electricians etc without reporting it as salary..
Now with ease of doing taxes..
I get an summary of all my earnings and all my taxes from the "Tax department".. I log onto their server.
I look over what I earned from my employer, returns or losses on my stocks,bonds,funds, my property values...
I correct if anything is wrong.
Hit return.
Takes me 5 min of work... if I am lazy.
How are taxes in the US?
Cash. That's the problem. People shoving cash down their pants and making their way to Switzerland. That's why Sweden wanted to move to a cashless society - as officially admitted to avoid tax evasion.
Whether you can make your annual tax statement in 5 min or 5 hours is irrelevant, your accountant gets to find the loopholes. Loopholes are actually quite legit. Running a pizza joint 3 islands over from the main business district and making next to no profit and getting caught by the authorities with the equivalent of over half a million USD in your pants and the boot of your car is the issue.
Sweden is screwed. Two worldwide car companies collapsing within a decade takes a special idiocracry.
Most estimates says its $1.5 Billion in tax evasion each year. Out of $142 Billion collected. Or 1%
Most of that is done by handymen, carpenters, electricians etc without reporting it as salary..
Now with ease of doing taxes..
I get an summary of all my earnings and all my taxes from the "Tax department".. I log onto their server.
I look over what I earned from my employer, returns or losses on my stocks,bonds,funds, my property values...
I correct if anything is wrong.
Hit return.
The development comes as Danish authorities grapple with an historic tax scandal, covering everything from $2 billion in dividend fraud, to systemic tax avoidance by local businesses and households.
The affair has shocked a nation that relies on a stable revenue stream to pay for its fabled welfare system.
Socialism is just another label and these days it can mean a lot of different things. Maybe it means we all can use the roads because we all pay taxes. Maybe it means your city or town has a park that everyone can use because everyone pays into it. The other way to use the park would be to keep it off limits to anyone who couldn't afford the admission price just to go there. A private park only for the rich and nothing for anyone else.
Some things are better when they are owned by everyone--things like public parks, our treasured National Parks, the highways, the museums and landmarks in Washington DC. Some things work better when the government owns or runs them, like the post office. Things that would be extremely expensive for an individual often work better if everybody pitches in and we share it.
I think a good name for all of this is a "mixed economy" where there's a mixture of capitalism and some social programs to restrain capitalism from going to the extreme where we would once again have something like the living conditions of most people during the Industrial Revolution--fantastic for the rich few, but disastrous for the other 99%. A dash of "socialism" or whatever you want to call it keeps things in a healthy balance and makes the country a better place for more of the people. As Abe Lincoln said (to paraphrase) You can't please everyone all of the time. --But if we have a mixed economy we can stop runaway capitalism from making life great for a very few while the rich steal the American quality of life from everyone else. Most successful countries have a mixed economy, not pure capitalism.
This post is FAR too sensible for this thread! You must be a snowflake, leftie, gun hating, socialist, soccer loving commie red
No, 100% socialism isn't good but neither is 100% capitalism. They are both too extreme. Just like our political parties now are too extreme. In the middle! Some of each so things balance out. We just need someone smart enough to figure out what things should be done by capitalism and what things should be done by social programs "socialism."
You are also seriously glossing over tax evasion undertaken in measures small and large that would make average Americans blush.
Exactly. European countries have no FATCA law, as does the US, so wealthy and/or high-income Europeans can freely use foreign/off-shore tax havens to evade taxes. And they do:
European countries have no FATCA laws, as does the US. Both income and wealth can be sheltered in foreign/off-shore tax havens, at will, to evade taxes. I posted a link in my prior post.
As an example... Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish billionaire founder of IKEA, paid not one thin dime in social services or income taxes to Sweden for 40 years merely by living in Switzerland and structuring the registration of IKEA in another foreign European country. All the while, he maintained his Swedish citizenship.
US citizens can't get away with that for 2 reasons:
1) US FATCA law requiring worldwide investment/financial institutions to report account details including deposits and total value to the IRS every year.
2) The US is one of only two countries (Eritrea is the other) that taxes its citizens' income regardless of where it's earned, worlwide, and regardless of where in the world they reside.
You missed the most important part...the fact that these nations rely on utterly opaque taxes such as the VAT, where the average taxpayer cannot tell exactly how much of the price of a product or service is tax, and how much is the actual cost of the product or service being purchased.
Do some taxpayers in other countries want to know how their taxes are expended? Sure...there probably are a few in every such nation. You may even have met one or two. But the fact that these populations will acquiesce to paying perniciously ubiquitous taxes they cannot readily quantify, such as a VAT, implies that their level of concern about tax expenditures is going to be commensurately lower as well.
In Canada all sales taxes including the GST or HST are shown on your bill.
In the UK the VAT is shown on your bill.
Are you sure you aren't confusing the sticker price, which in a lot of places includes the tax, but when you get your bill, the tax is shown?
I'm also positive that IF it weren't, people know what the tax is...you can simply look it up.
Heck in France they had riots over taxes....when was the last time you saw that in the US?
Here in BC we demanded a referendum when the province wanted to merge GST and PST. We got one, and the motion was defeated.
There is no reason why people in other countries don't care about taxes, they do.
US citizens can't get away with that for 2 reasons
So Americans can't move to another country and run a company and still have to pay taxes to the US? How socialist..
If a person wants to live somewhere else and pay taxes there, I belive they should be able to do so.
There should be minimum payments if they want to be situated in Switzerland but spend their time in Sweden.. but that is how some countries manages international tax laws..
But, you want me to list the huuuuuge list of rich Americans who use professional help to hide or pay less in taxes? Its not a Scandinavian issue... Rich 0.1% people have the means to avoid paying a lot of taxes and every sane multi millionaire in the US does it!
The affair has shocked a nation that relies on a stable revenue stream to pay for its fabled welfare system.
And there is no tax evasion going on in the US?
So your logic is... Scandinavian countries have tax evasion problems.. And that somehow means the model does not work???
EVERY country has tax evasion problems.
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