> concludes by: "it would be perfect if not for taxes"

People wouldn't be as friendly and well educated if they went bankrupt when losing their jobs, getting a cancer, had to take $100k loans for uni, &c. the towns wouldn't be nice and clean if people didn't pay taxes for regular cleaning, ...

There are very very few countries with low taxes and nice quality of life for the average Joe, and the exceptions usually don't want you to move in. Try Albania or Bulgaria, you'll quickly understand why most people are mostly happy about paying taxes

Taxes these days keep up the ponzi scheme of european pensions and an influx of low skilled migrants that are not incentivized to work.

There is a a lot of budget between ur citizens not going bankrupt when they get sick and taking 50% of their salary.

It's always been a ponzi scheme, even 20 years ago when you enjoyed it and thought everything was perfect.

> low skilled migrants that are not incentivized to work.

Including all the FIRE people and tech migrants who come to take freebies while not chipping in

Aka a low wage labor pool to plug the youth demographic gap.

If European countries had sustainable fertility rate, then they could be choosy about immigration.

At 1.3-1.5, well, people have to come from somewhere...

I don't know too many nativists / nationalists who agree with the statement 'I am fine with my country being poorer and worse off economically in exchange for getting rid of immigrants.'

Their political champions bill is as though removing immigrant labor will somehow make the economy better.

Because, yes, when has a smaller, more expensive domestic labor pool ever helped a country's economic competitiveness? /s

But having a wealth tax with a very low threshold is something else entirely. It means that I'm not free to invest and grow the money that is already mine, that I already paid taxes on in the first place. It means I'll always be held back and prevented from advancing as much as I could. It means that improving your situation so that next year you're doing a little better than this year, is something that the system actively pushes you away from.

There are also practical problems with taxing wealth. Income tax is "easy": by definition you have the money to pay for it because it's charged on money that you've received. With a wealth tax, you might not have the money. For example, if you own an investment apartment or some other illiquid asset you can't just sell a piece of it every year to pay the tax. You'll either have to find the money out of income (assuming you have enough) or ruin your investment strategy by selling the whole thing when you didn't plan to.

It also distorts the risk/reward tradeoff: many investments might not make sense at all if you're suddenly paying 2% a year of the value.

This is a strawman trotted out against wealth taxes.

Stated another way: no, people shouldn't be able to put their wealth into an arbitrary form to make it untaxable.

After that, it's standard planning. Owe an unexpected amount of tax on a high performing asset you don't want to liquidate? Take a loan with it/gains as collateral. (The same as people do now!)

The bigger issue is valuation of illiquid assets. I.e. how to properly tax someone benefiting from opaque trusts or with shares of non-public assets (which they might be inclined to hide the profitability of).

So your wealth tax on 100k is 0.2% or so...

Again, my math might have missed a zero somewhere.

This was a deal breaker for me as someone on the FIRE path. It's neighbor, Belgium, is much better in this respect.

There are ~200 countries doing worse.

I could understand Amsterdam/Berlin for the vibe and the fact that everyone speaks english. Portugal/Spain/Greece/Italy for the weather, the nordic countries for nature and the overall lifestyle... but Belgium, really ? no offence but it's like Luxembourg, if it wasn't for tax reasons nobody would ever willingly move there

What if you plan to stay permanently? Does that change your priority for accumulating more personal wealth?

If you have an ultra-low risk investment strategy focused on value preservation and inflation beating (where your expected returns are in the low single digits e.g. 2 - 3%), that does start to look like being robbed blind.

> It is only fair that those that have a lot of money contribute

Really? 60k is "a lot of money"? Yes, it's a lot in the sense that many people have far less than that, but it's not "a lot" in the scheme of things when we're talking about saving and investing.

With 60k you'll be lucky even to get the down-payment on a mortgage for a small apartment, which you'll then be paying off every month for the next several decades. Should we be taxing people on their wealth before they've even had the chance to own their first home? I would argue that such a person can't legitimately be called wealthy.

For one, they ruled that the wealth tax is against the EU human rights agenda. So they're scrambling to come up with a solution. Even with this tax, the projected weight isn't terrible. For reference my wife and I are CoastFIRE here with ~2mil USD in NW and the tax is marginal compared to our returns.

Yes, and about half the Netherlands is below sea level, something I cannot abide.