• GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Wow, this is just entirely wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.

    Sweden has a maximum of around 55% income tax bracket if you’re in a municipality with high income tax, but billionaires never are and as such would be taxed probably at most 50% income tax bracket.

    This is of course entirely irrelevant because billionaires don’t make their money on income. Sweden has fairly low capital gains taxes - 30% on regular accounts, and a special account that taxes the whole account value by a low percentage, which shakes out in average years to even lower taxes on capital. This assumes you even keep your capital in the country, which is a big if.

    There’s also no inheritance tax, no gift tax and no property tax. Sweden is actually an unusually good place to be a billionaire as far as taxation goes, and a below average place to earn a high salary as far as taxation goes.

      • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        57% is the tax on “one-time gains” - bonuses and other such things.

        This means that you’re probably overpaying on it, but you might also be underpaying on your income taxes (usually ~30% even if you reach the ~50%-tax bracket). Worst case scenario, you’ve lent some money interest-free to the government that you get back on your tax returns.

        • Fenrisulfir
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          8 months ago

          You can borrow from someone else. When someone else borrows from you, you lend it. Or lent as the past tense

          • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            Thanks, updated. I think my mistake stems from Swedish only having one word for the concept, regardless of the direction of the transaction.

            • Fenrisulfir
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              8 months ago

              I’ve noticed a lot of my european friends doing the same

              • GreyEyedGhost
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                8 months ago

                I think the only english-speaking people in North America who know this read Hamlet in high school.

          • lemmyseikai@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Ish…

            They could have said “you have let the government borrow from you tax free.”

            But yeah, the general idea holds.

      • TheBeege@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Correct, but there are those that would take this as a source of truth and run with it. It’s not the smart thing to do, but we already see people doing this sort of behavior on other social media.

        We shouldn’t enable the problem, even if it’s an innocent mistake

        • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          The point of the meme is to highlight that rich people should be taxed more

          You can’t include bracket taxing, asset taxing etc in a commit meme format.

          If people get their facts off memes, they indeed have a problem but you can’t accommodate for all who arent critical of their knowledge sources

          • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            I don’t buy this argument - if you’re going to claim something to be the case, it should at least vaguely resemble the truth. Going by the ‘rules’ of this meme, Sweden should be right next to the U.S, or even take the U.S’ place given that the U.S ranks better on wealth equality (not income equality where Sweden ranks better).

            We should absolutely tax billionaires more. We should make memes about it to spread the word. We should also make those memes at least kind of accurate.

            To understand one significant downside of this - Swedes reading this meme might think that we don’t have a billionaire-taxation problem in our country. That’s actively harmful to the cause.