Wow, one of the few times I get to be proud of lil ol’ Belgium.
I often joke with family that we live in the best country in the world by default. Not because it’s a paradise by any stretch of the imagination but because the rest of the world went to shit faster than we did.
So far…
In the Netherlands we always outperform you stupid Belgians. As you can see, we are higher than you on this map too!
Hmm, surprised it’s that much lower - wonder why? Maybe 1% in .be hide wealth in .lu , and fgov is not good at tracing it. Also chateaux in the south of belgium seem relatively cheap (wrt elsewhere).
I suppose it’s the same everywhere… but each time Sweden gets amnesia and votes in the right wing we get raped:
M: “Hey let’s give away XXX to the private sector and let them rape the country. It will generate prosperity for everyone!”
Swedish voter: “What a great idea, why haven’t we done this sooner?!”
I guess this is going to depend on how you measure, right? What’s the methodology?
For extra context, we have very high income taxes but none or very low wealth taxes for things like inheritance or owning stocks. Making it cheap to be rich and expensive to work.
Wealth inequality, not income inequality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality Sweden is 12, US is 25 or something.
I‘m really surprised. I always thought that wealth in the Nordish countries are quite equally distributed. Don’t you have a very flat income difference? How it comes?
I think its because most of the flattening of the income mainly touches the 99% because the income taxation isn’t that effective for owning people as they often get their money from owning stuff instead of earning a salary
Honestly surprised the UK is as low as it is. I would have though Londongrad would have created a small group of super rich owning most of the country.
Nah, it’s just incredibly common amongst wealthy Britons to use schemes such as having your own personal Charity in one of the Channel Islands that pays for all your life and owns all your assets, so it looks like that person isn’t at all rich.
Also the UK maybe uniquelly in the World has a Non-Resident Tax Status (for tax avoidance) which has nothing to do with the country one actually lives in, so a person can live in the UK and still declare him or herself as such and pay zero tax on income from abroad (and if you’re rich it’s pretty easy to set up a company abroad to channel all your income through).
(In fact Britain’s billionaire Prime Minister was outted a few year ago as using such a schema)
Some of these schems had becom so prevalent that the Tories cracked down on the small fry (mainly self employed middle class) use of them too to avoid tax, but making sure ot was still fine for the rich (for example, Non Resident Tax Status now requires a year payment of 60k, so it doesn’t make sense for somebody making, say 100k a year but it still does for those making millions)
In the land of the World’s Money Laundromat most rich people avail themselves of the very abundant specialists in setting up schemes to make it look like they don’t actually own any wealth, especially because it’s risk free since none of the two main parties has any interest whatsoever in cracking down on tax evasion and avoidance by the wealthy.
I thought 35%ish in the US was bad. 56% in Russia is one of the more shocking stats I’ve seen about their inequality.
All of these are absurd.
And why we can’t have nice things.
