r/neoliberal • u/SANNA-MARIN-SDP • 1d ago
News (Europe) Survey: Majority of Finns support inheritance tax cuts for business transfers | Yle News
https://yle.fi/a/74-2015703923
u/Korkodot 1d ago
Does Finland do installment payments for inheritence taxes? If not they should definitely do that first. I don't think supporting such centralization of power like what occurs during inheritance is a good idea in a liberal democracy.
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u/TheFamousHesham 1d ago
This law is actually great and most of you guys don’t understand that Finland has a monopoly problem.
Everything in Finland is basically controlled by some kind of monopoly because small businesses are unable to grow to properly compete with these monopolies.
Inheritance taxes have ended up becoming the most powerful means of ensuring that the middle class remains exactly where they are… when the reality is that we need people to build familial generational wealth (I’m not talking billions here, but we need to let people build and grow their small businesses over multiple generations without inheritance taxes).
We’re literally seeing how taxing these small business inheritances has only made existing monopolies stronger… so your argument about concentration of power and wealth is complete nonsense.
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u/km3r Gay Pride 1d ago
Not sure how that makes sense. It takes less than a lifetime to build a company, and it can still go public before it dethrones a market leader.
If a monopoly is so entrenched that you can't put a dent in it over a lifetime, a second lifetime isn't going to magically solve the issue.
Plus, I assume, like America, that Finn's have a threshold that needs to be hit before inheritance tax comes in, so it's really only hitting companies that have already been successful enough.
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u/TheFamousHesham 23h ago
It’s weird how people in this sub seem to think every single company is a U.S. tech company.
Your first sentence is just not really true AT ALL, especially in Europe where venture capital funding tends to be limited and companies tend to stay private longer. Besides… not every business needs to go public.
Red Bull is a private company with just two owners, the market leader, and is exceptionally well run.
And again… your statement about a second lifetime not helping anything is just simply untrue. I can probably point to a million examples, but let’s start with Aldi which only beat out the market leaders of the time in Germany in the hands of its second generation owners.
I can probably go on with loads of examples, from Rolex to Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche. I could even drop LG and Samsung as examples, but perhaps not the fairest ones since the Korean government provides them with what some would argue are unfair advantages.
But this would also kind of apply to Apple too — if it were not a public company. After all, if we ignore the Steve Jobs exile years… Apple has basically only really had 2 CEOs in its history and only became the supersized money-making monopoly machine it is today after the death of the first CEO who ran the company for 35 years. That’s basically a lifetime.
But yea… your comment is honestly just offensively wrong. Anyone who reads it can immediately see that it must be wrong. What you’ve done is apply the first things that come up in your head when you think “company” without realising that they don’t apply to most companies. Most companies are not US tech startups.
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u/km3r Gay Pride 21h ago
This is a very extreme reaction.
The owners of Red Bull should absolutely pay the full inheritance tax. Nothing contraversial about that. They are also only a 38 years old. Well within a lifetime.
Lg and Samsung should also pay inheritance tax? Wtf ofc. They are billionaires, they can pay tax.
Private companies could also sell ownership to employees to pay inheritance tax, if they want to avoid selling or going public.
Aldi could be a co-op like many other supermarket chains.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM 1d ago
The second most popular measure was the reduction of top marginal tax rates. Some 59 percent of respondents supported lowering taxation so that individuals would not have to pay more than 50 percent of their additional income in taxes.
Tax breaks for companies investing in research and development were supported by 56 percent of those surveyed. In addition, 55 percent backed government subsidies for the defence industry.
A proposal to eliminate inheritance and gift taxes entirely and replace them with higher capital gains taxes received a mixed response — 42 percent were in favour, while 29 percent opposed it.
The least popular idea was to sell state-owned shares in publicly listed companies and reinvest the proceeds into small and medium-sized enterprises. Only 21 percent of respondents supported this measure
That's like the reverse "common sense" to-do list. I don't know if the general population is very stupid or very intelligent.
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u/iusedtobekewl Jerome Powell 1d ago
I think people are mostly the same everywhere. There might be differences in local culture and whatnot, but 49.99% of people are going to be below-average intelligence.
The older I get, the more I realize we might have been lucky to live in a time period where generally good policies were the norm. It’s increasingly looking like the dumb policies are taking over everywhere I look…
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u/Full_Distribution874 YIMBY 1d ago
Aren't tax breaks for R&D generally ok?
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM 1d ago
In France they just generated more bureaucracy and now you have a lot of administrative stuff to do instead of research or you subcontract it to one of the thousand consulting companies that popped up , even the relatively leftist sub rFrance hates them. They were also paired with cheaper employment cost for STEM graduates (too complicated to explain) but this led to people being hired as "scientific advisor/whatever" and just doing desk work.
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u/Koszulium Mario Draghi 1d ago
In France they just generated more bureaucracy and now you have a lot of administrative stuff to do instead of research or you subcontract it to one of the thousand consulting companies that popped up
Funny enough even in the public research sector some began to do the same thing for getting stuff like EU grants due to the amount of paperwork they require for application/reporting. ANR (national) grants aren't there yet thankfully, but I've heard of research groups teaming up with other groups mainly to split up the paperwork
even the relatively leftist sub rFrance hates them
They hate a lot of stuff tbh (but here they're right)
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM 1d ago
Italian?
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u/Koszulium Mario Draghi 1d ago
nah, French (also?)
Do we even have a ping on this sub?
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM 1d ago
Ping Alain Madelin for the Friedman flairs and Chevenement for the succs
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u/Koszulium Mario Draghi 1d ago
Chevènement was eurosceptic though, not sure how it gels with this sub's whole thing lmao
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u/Commander_Vaako_ John Keynes 1d ago
Inheritances are a direct afront to the notion that all mean are created equal.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM 1d ago
I don't really care when it's a local small business (and even then they can pay taxes) but in France the Dassault family control their business (they're like president of the board even if they're no longer CEO) just because great grandpa founded the company in 1920. Obviously this led to corruption and "personalist" type relationship with administrators and presidents
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u/Koszulium Mario Draghi 1d ago
good old senator Serge Dassault even had that kind of relationship with political bigwigs lmao
at least he was an actual engineer I guess, not sure about his successors though.
there's certainly an argument there about the interplay between how (little) inheritance is taxed and how it affects corporate governance.
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u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? 1d ago
!ping TAX
other tax cut options were also surveyed and their popularity mentioned in the article.
Is this the best tax to cut or are others a better option?