The wealth tax, which Frederiksen announced in the Danish parliament, the Folketinget, as she called the election, is a 0.5% tax on assets held by an individual worth more than 25m kroner (about £2m) that will, among other things, lower class sizes for six- to nine-year-olds from about 26 to 14.
Money is fungible so of course no tax specifically pays for something. But the claim will always be that a new tax is to pay for something fluffy bunny. Rather than what should be happening, taking the last fluffy bunny that didn’t work out to be shot.
So they’ll have to keep taxing 0.5% every year to maintain class sizea at the desired level. Then it’ll need to be 1% to pay for the next loony idea. Pretty soon they’ll be talking proper money.
I wonder how many of those with assets below just 25m kroner will take steps to not breach the threshold?
If its just on everything over 25m kr, then around 35m kr is where it will pay to do the things to avoid this tax.
I assume pretty much everyone with assets significantly over that would.
As with UK inheritance tax, its the “slightly well off” who will pay most of the bill and the “rich” will pay lawyers and accountants instead.
This is backed up with an exit tax to stop people living (tax resident) in Denmark from emigrating hence depriving the Danish state of tax.
If it goes through the Danes and others living there will have that EU freedom of movement, but if they are moderately rich it’s a freedom that they will need to pay for.
I like the Ancient Greek idea (i think it was them) of rich people getting the naming rights for stuff their taxes pay for. The Ove Arup Small School perhaps.
“In 1997, the wealth tax was abolished entirely under Social Democratic PM Poul Nyrup Rasmussen — ironically, the same party now proposing its reinstatement.”
Studies have shown small class sizes can be detrimental to educational development. They give more teacher to pupil time and so stifle peer to peer and self learning techniques.
Around 25 is the optimal number.
The UK runs low 30s but then we squander tax money on all sorts of wealth destructive things instead.
Denmark is of course getting rid of its migrants, so won’t class sizes fall?
I was going to note that, in the US, class size has shown no correlation with better learning outcomes. But smaller class sizes is a very widely held magic idea.
Smaller class sizes means more teachers needed. No surprise that the teacher unions would be promoting this idea.
After a long struggle with a recalcitrant AI, it seems Danes pay $35K per head in income taxes where in the UK it’s about $16K. There’s no direct comparison, obviously but to have a tax bill in that range and for a fairly well-off person who owns a mere two million quid in house and savings to have to pay another £10k would be quite an imposition.
I can’t imagine why anyone with two million quid of wealth would stay there. I like the Danes but if you get that rich then move somewhere warm.
Further, there seems to be no way a punter is going to find a wodge of cash to pay this tax other than out of already taxed income, be it income tax, capital gains or tax on share income or savings interest. Maybe you could sell stocks which are showing a loss. Oh, I forgot there’s a swimming pool full of gold coins.
14? Pah! My mother kept my old report cards: our primary school class was 45.
It went too slowly; I suppose a class of half the size might have been better if they got the streaming right. But nonetheless it was OK (so far as my lamentable memory reports.)
The more I look at schooling the more I think that nearly all of it is genes, especially in the internet era where swots can go home and read stuff, play games.
In the UK, there’s always this “kids do better at private schools because iof class sizes” but it’s also the case that they get a smarter intake.
When we gave up on state schooling and moved our daughter to a private school the new school had bigger classes than the old.
Ah, I hear you say, but what about those acres of green playing fields, the swimming pool, …?
Yep, she gave those up too because her parents thought the purpose of a school was education not swimming.
It’s probably mostly genes. I knew kids from well off families whose parents were always hiring expensive tutors. Didn’t do them the slightest bit of good, and why would it? There’s no substitute for being clever, and no cure for stupid. If little Johnny wasn’t bright enough to grasp it the first three times, he would have done so.
It’s brains and inclination. A girl in my daughter’s class was an obsessive about biology and chemistry. She’d studied the a level courses in the summer holidays and was reading science papers. Got an a* in both and went to Oxford.
The junior school I went to, every single one out of a class of 39 passed the 11 plus. And the catchment area included a large council estate & was otherwise mostly working/lower middle class. Of course there was large Jewish element who often outperform but that’s going to affect average not the margin. And in case you’re wondering, these classes weren’t streamed.
To add, they also informed the parents of the rankings. So I could gloat over being top boy with two girls above me. See, I’m not as daft as you think… Why I got a scholarship to public school. Which I declined. Smart move that. Could have been the ruin of me.
Wealth destruction is their game. Fluffy bunnies are BS to get people to accept it.
If they’re anything like us – and they probably are, the fools – it’s not class sizes which are the problem… it’s the kids.
Kids like my maternal grandfather left school at fourteen and went to work on the farm but had learned algebra and Latin and Shakespeare in a class of sixty a hundred years ago.
Then over the years teachers stopped being crusty old blokes and angry Tory spinsters and became hippy chicks and weedy Leninists and decided that every child was special and that it should be a crime to discipline them, and this, hilariously, is where they are now.
Absolutely pissing myself laughing, here.
Not that the silly twats will learn anything (the teachers, not the kids).
As an aside, and hashtag innocent face, did any teachers walk out over their colleague in Batley being forced into hiding with his family?
My grandfather was a teacher in a one-room school. Don’t know how many kids it was, but all different grades were right there together.
On this topic over the last week I’ve been notified on my Old Pals feed that two of my maths teachers have just died, within weeks of each other. Both of them when I was at school were the last end of the old-school pre-hippy teaching generation. When I became a school governor one was a teacher rep and he mentioned he was a committed Conservative, but voted for “our lot” to keep the Socialists out.
The other one gently persuaded me out of going into teaching, saying I could do a lot better.
I sent a bit of cash to that teacher bloke. There’s a crowdfunder, for anyone unaware of it.
His treatment, and the Establishment’s near total silence on the matter, is a total fucking outrage.
The ‘locals’ who threatened him out to have been on the first plane back to Shitholistan. Or in prison. And then on the first p. b. t. S.
“Kids like my maternal grandfather left school at fourteen and went to work on the farm but had learned algebra and Latin and Shakespeare in a class of sixty a hundred years ago.”
I’ve said this before, but most kids should finish school at 14. There are academics, science nerds for whom school after that is useful, but for everyone else it’s mostly a waste of time. You can learn all the generally useful life stuff by then.
It would also deal with most of the disciplinary problems which are about bored kids who don’t want to be there. Around the same age, kids start to figure out what they want to be doing all day. They aren’t just being led around my mummy. If you look at when most filmmakers shot their first film, it’s around 12-14. Lots of them would rather be learning to fix cars or doing hairdressing as it interests them. They see no point in learning what happens if you burn potassium permanganate and they’re about right about it. When is that ever going to be applied in adult life?
This will be a good example of how commies lie about wealth taxes. e.g. claiming it will only affect the really really rich and it will definitely just be a one off tax …
That article is extremely light on detail. What assets are covered? Are they trying to apply it globally? How much is the exit tax?
They basically just want a wealth tax to punish “the rich”. They don’t care if or how well it works.
Then they inflate the currency so the tax hits most everybody.
“Once you start paying the Danegeld you never stop paying the Dane(ish government)”.
Incidentally an annual 0.5% wealth tax works is remarkably close to the relatively little known 6% 10-Year Anniversary or Periodic Charge on the capital value of assets held in UK Discretionary Trusts. An unwelcome example of tax levied on inflationary and unrealised gains – pretty much like a wealth tax in other words.
I particularly despise legalised theft of this nature where the same assets are repeatedly assessed, not unlike mainstream IHT where the accumulated liability over several deaths for assets retained with a family can easily approach the entire capital value. (Asset worth £1m, tax £400k. 10-20 years later asset is worth £2m so another 40% brings the total IHT paid to £1.2m or 60% of present value. 20 years later the asset is worth £3m, further IHT of £1.2m means a total of £2.4m has been paid equivalent to a cumulative 80%).
IFAs or so-called wealth managers (if one goes that route) happily charge these sorts of %s (and more) for their *expertise*… The longer-term compounding effects of those fees can be every bit as diluting.
Yes, I know, voluntary and all that (for an adviser), simply to highlight/agree wrt the significant leakage/losses involved.
Gamecock’s theory is “wealth/finance managers” exist for women. Women don’t feel, probably correctly, that they know how to do it, and, if married, they don’t trust their husbands to know what the heck they are doing.
Anecdata: I occasionally get invites to seminar dinners where a wealth manager is going to tell me he knows better how to handle my money.
I’m retired.
He’s working.
He’s going to tell me what?
Can I charge him for advice?
You’re confusing fungibility with hypothecatation.
The bigger context is that our current model of Western democratic government is bankrupt, yet has an infinite desire to spunk more cash. Punitively soaking “the rich” like this never works out long term, but nobody’s thinking long term.
In the end, there is only Milei’s chainsaw.
The Ancients warned that democracy could only last until the people realized they could vote themselves a raid on the treasury.
Moderns figured out that an empty treasury didn’t matter, they could just borrow more.
Current US debt: $39,000,000,000,000.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
As if that isn’t enough, they figured out that they could just print more money. US dollar was worth 1 dollar in 1923. In 2023, it took $15.50 to get the same purchasing power.
I am confident people are scheming now to spend more with an empty treasury.
Everyone’s trying hard to Zimbabwfy??