Taxing Entrepreneurial Wealth: Evidence from Norway, 2021–2025

gaborcselle

TLDR Norway’s recent wealth-tax increases caused some very rich people to leave, but the “billionaire exodus” was economically much smaller than the headlines suggested—and the tax still raised a lot more revenue without detectable damage to business investment.

usernomdeguerre

I doubt there's a way to structure this perfectly given one has to start from the baseline of these taxes being introduced, but is 21-25 a reasonable benchmark? Naively, it felt like a lot of fluctuations and rubberbanding occurred right after Covid which wouldn't necessary make representative set.

erelong

Reducing taxes attracts billionaires which improves the country better / more?

Spooky23

Now that we have the socialist Trump doctrine established with the help of the tech billionaires, we have a precedent for going forward - partially nationalize the private entities. Start with the startups, and move into the equity funds and family offices. Once you hit certain thresholds, you pay a 2.5% wealth tax or provide 1% equity, capped at 25%. It’s totally legal now as the toadies on the Supreme Court have adopted an expansive interpretation of executive power.

dzink

They lost the future billionaires along with those who left.

asdfman123

I used to worry about the exodus of billionaires. Now that they're doing their best to undermine American democracy, perhaps we should do more to encourage them to leave.

voidhorse

The "billionaire flight" problem actually illustrates perfectly why you need a wealth tax in the first place: to prevent billionaires from having undue levels of power and consequence on the populus. When you let individuals accumulate outright unreasonable amounts of money you give them a single random individual, with no governing credentials, whose choices should have no bearing on others the ability to indirectly effect the economic fate of thousands or millions of other people just because of their selfishness (to the extent that effects actually materialize, which to large extent they don't anyway...) It's outright laughable that any government would consider giving individuals such power over the fates of the people they are supposed to serve, represent, protect (at least in the liberal democratic tradition). Humanity should not strive for kingship, whether minted through "god given right" or coin. We should strive for collective, distributive, balanced control of resources.

asdff

The type of billionaire to be so much of a knob to actually leave over this is exactly the kind of billionaire you want to leave and free yourself and your countrymen of. Some of the most selfish, greedy, maniacal people who will tell the law to bend for them to get out of their way.

refurb

Seems like European would benefit more from an inherited wealth tax than an entrepreneurial wealth tax. Europe could benefit a lot from breaking the stranglehold of old money.

robocat

Looks like a lesson in how to play zero-sum games to lose. The USA is better at playing the zero-sum game of where to begin a business. Zero-sum because many businesses are winner-takes-all and the country that business starts-up in is the one that wins. Business founders are greedy (almost by definition), and a country needs to think what marginally motivates a founder to keep on going (or to founding 2nd/3rd business). Hate Meta, or even hate Zuckerberg, but the USA is winning export earnings from the rest of the world because of Meta (and likewise other billionaire companies). On the third foot, I'm guessing Zuckerberg has other motivations than more dollars? The game isn't equitable, and the wealth disparity is heinous, and perhaps even the products are despicable. However everyone in the USA is living off the back of that wealth coming into the country. It is really noticable in New Zealand where top marginal rate is 39% and GST (sales tax) is 15%. Why work an hour to bring in in a dollar to NZ when you get less than 50 cents (after all the other taxes). Our left parties want to tax wealth at 50%+ (if 2% wealth tax and drawdown of 4% ). Invisible inflation makes the taxation much much higher. A wealth tax of 1% sounds trivial, but it isn't when compared to risk-free returns after drawdowns. Unfortunately most voters are not founders, so they don't understand marginal motivation. And voters don't understand who brings money into the country. Voters just want increasing amounts of money spent, and politicians cater to them. If anyone here is a game mechanics designer, what do you most notice about the motivation of taxing wealth?

tlogan

The San Francisco Bay Area has about 2 million more people than the entire country of Norway. So, in my opinion, we cannot reasonably extrapolate from policies implemented in Norway to predict whether they would work in California or the U.S.

a34729t

Norway is UAE but lutefisk and burky blonde women. And now their sovreign wealth fund is investing less in Europe cause growth... An oil scheikhdom is not the place to draw generalizations from when compared tk advanced industrialized countries.