Norway oil is way more relevant for your thesis than Norway taxes

Yea right, so is the German oil for Germany. /s

You seem to be quite the expert on Norway. Can you elaborate how they prop up social services with oil money?

Why do you feel offended?

OP had the thesis that the "Norway sovereign fund" is funded by high taxes. This fund is also known as the "Oil fund": The Government Pension Fund Global, also known as the Oil Fund, was established in 1990 to invest the surplus revenues of the Norwegian petroleum sector.

Conclusion: The Norwegian society is not just rich just because you are that smart. You obviously had a good portion of luck.

I believe the parent comment is referring to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Lol, don't speak about high taxes if you don't even know how Norway and oil go together...

lol not like the us could do the same.

So does Texas and Alaska, and even California?

Doesn't Alaska provide a small basic income for its citizens funded by oil revenue?

Norway oil [with a visionary who helped guide its investment] is more relevant.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19594153

The US has 6.7x more oil reserves than Norway: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-reserves-by-country/

So US has around 9x less per capita since only ~5 million people live in Norway?

Since people are misreading this comment, either deliberately or because I have not been clear enough, I am going to assume good faith and edit the comment to be more clear.

---

And 6.7x the amount of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global exceeds the entire annual budget of the US government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...

Imagine if the US could just magically borrow from next year's budget, but at zero cost? That's the net effect of having an entire additional several trillion dollars laying around.

In hard numbers, that 6.7x works out to around $9.3 trillion, of which it's a pretty safe assumption that you can "borrow" around 3% of it annually, forever. That works out to around $280 billion.

It ain't chump change. We could easily end homelessness in the US with that amount, and have much more left over to do even more social good.

https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/social-justic...

After we take the 50-ish billion a year it would take to eradicate homelessness (keep in mind, we can sustain this in real terms approximately forever), let's move on to higher education. The Debt Free College act would reportedly cost the US $75 billion a year.

https://educationdata.org/how-much-would-free-college-cost

No problem. We've only spent half of what we can borrow in perpetuity from the future with this hypothetical sovereign wealth fund laying around.

Let's go for the triple crown and give everybody universal, employer-independent health coverage.

Oh, guess what? That was a trick. Implementing universal healthcare, simply replacing premiums by taxes, would save the US many more billions of dollars we could put to good use doing even more social good.

https://www.citizen.org/news/fact-check-medicare-for-all-wou...

Or maybe it would cost an additional $149 billion. Who cares? We're still under budget.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

And, so, now, we've reached a point where nobody in the US needs to ever worry about student loans, medical costs, or homelessness again. (Well, okay, not nobody -- we still need to figure out something for the people who have taken out student loans already, but I think we can probably handle that.) It's not quite the extensive welfare state that Norway has, but it's pretty damn close.

Guess what happens to the labor market under those conditions? If you said "it becomes much more like a free market," you guessed right! And who can argue against that, really?

Comparing a pension fund, which is designed to pay out over, well, indefinitely, to an annual budget, makes no sense. One is a rate. One is a total. It's like saying you can fly 400 mph but the earth is only 90 mega-miles from the sun and since 90 is less than 400 the sun is not that far.

Numerology doesn't work in economics.

The fact is that Norway has this luxury solely through massive per capita oil wealth. The US cannot come close to this.

Norwegian taxes are not too far off from CA or NY taxes to be honest. The marginal rate tops out at under 50%.

It’s worse for capital gains and they have a wealth taxes so a lot worse for some.

I'm not sure the top marginal rate is relevant unless you compare at what income it kicks in at?

The top CA or NY bracket is dependent on the top US federal bracket which kicks in at $537,000.

Not to mention the <cough> 25% VAT in Norway.

This only applies to the upper middle class not the insanely rich though. Anyone who hires a tax attorney is not paying high taxes in this country.

That's just not true. The top 1% pay 33% of the tax (and the top 10%, "upper middle class", pay 70%). I think myth just causes confusion and misplaced anger.

Yes, but these stats obviously take into account only paid taxes and wealth that remains visible. If you have 50 bn$, of which 1 is kept and taxed locally, and 49 moved through shell companies to offshore tax heavens, you'll still end up as one of the top tax payers, even if you are evading about ~5000%. Obviously this is much harder to do if you earn 200k/year.

Yes, if the top 1% paid their fair share, they would pay more than 33% of the country's taxes. But nevertheless they do in fact pay 33% of the country's taxes.

so is not paying more than their per-capita ratio not a fair share? I think 33% for a 1% cohort is quite large.

Why does the relative amount of tax paid against the total networth matter in this instance?

Would you have someone who's broke and unemployed pay the same amount of tax as a billionaire?

Ideally taxes shouldn't be a large burden to anyone. The richer someone is, the larger absolute amount of taxes that person can pay for the same burden level. In fact, it's not just a fixed percent. The richer someone is, the larger percent of taxes that person can pay for the same burden level.

The rich got to where they are by using the infrastructure built by the government. A rich person gets more value from the government than a poor person, so thus it's fair that a rich person pays more in taxes.

What proportion of wealth do they have access to?