Wow, one of the few times I get to be proud of lil ol' Belgium.
I often joke with family that we live in the best country in the world by default. Not because it's a paradise by any stretch of the imagination but because the rest of the world went to shit faster than we did.
So far...
In the Netherlands we always outperform you stupid Belgians. As you can see, we are higher than you on this map too!
Hmm, surprised it's that much lower - wonder why? Maybe 1% in .be hide wealth in .lu , and fgov is not good at tracing it. Also chateaux in the south of belgium seem relatively cheap (wrt elsewhere).
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Also Portugal! I’m consistently pleasantly surprised every time i read or hear something about that country. And I’ve still never been.
I suppose it’s the same everywhere.. but each time Sweden gets amnesia and votes in the right wing we get raped:
M: “Hey let’s give away XXX to the private sector and let them rape the country. It will generate prosperity for everyone!”
Swedish voter: “What a great idea, why haven’t we done this sooner?!”
For extra context, we have very high income taxes but none or very low wealth taxes for things like inheritance or owning stocks. Making it cheap to be rich and expensive to work.
Wealth inequality, not income inequality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality Sweden is 12, US is 25 or something.
I‘m really surprised. I always thought that wealth in the Nordish countries are quite equally distributed. Don’t you have a very flat income difference? How it comes?
I think its because most of the flattening of the income mainly touches the 99% because the income taxation isn't that effective for owning people as they often get their money from owning stuff instead of earning a salary
Ah okay. So, Sweden managed to iron the glassfloor to the top. It isn’t possible for standard and even top performers to get to the 1% as they will always rely income with high taxation for a living. With this perspective my country (Germany) seems to be hard but it might be possible.
We aren’t much better off over here, don’t fool yourself. Don’t make the mistake of buying into the same empty promises of "yes it sucks almost everyone is poor and virtually nobody makes it out, but if i do it right I will" - no you won’t.
Chances for literally winning the lottery are higher than being a hard, honest worker playing by the rules and making it big.
I can’t underwrite your „almost everyone is poor“ I’ve been in countries where families live in houses out of cardbox. Kids with just one leg. Girls being sold. In Europe is nobody poor! If you write this, it’s a slap in the face of the poor in the south.
Textbook whataboutism.
I can’t change what other countries fail to provide for their people, nor is it my responsibility as a random citizen. And it certainly has zero bearing on my economic outlook in Germany, do you want to tell me I should shut up and take it because random third world country #637 has issues with rape and murder?
Bruh.
Honestly surprised the UK is as low as it is. I would have though Londongrad would have created a small group of super rich owning most of the country.
Nah, it's just incredibly common amongst wealthy Britons to use schemes such as having your own personal Charity in one of the Channel Islands that pays for all your life and owns all your assets, so it looks like that person isn't at all rich.
Also the UK maybe uniquelly in the World has a Non-Resident Tax Status (for tax avoidance) which has nothing to do with the country one actually lives in, so a person can live in the UK and still declare him or herself as such and pay zero tax on income from abroad (and if you're rich it's pretty easy to set up a company abroad to channel all your income through).
(In fact Britain's billionaire Prime Minister was outted a few year ago as using such a schema)
Some of these schems had becom so prevalent that the Tories cracked down on the small fry (mainly self employed middle class) use of them too to avoid tax, but making sure ot was still fine for the rich (for example, Non Resident Tax Status now requires a year payment of 60k, so it doesn't make sense for somebody making, say 100k a year but it still does for those making millions)
In the land of the World's Money Laundromat most rich people avail themselves of the very abundant specialists in setting up schemes to make it look like they don't actually own any wealth, especially because it's risk free since none of the two main parties has any interest whatsoever in cracking down on tax evasion and avoidance by the wealthy.
Islas caimán, Seychelles , Front men, money laundering, etc sounds familiar? Russia don't have an issue to show the "inequity", corruption , etc . For this cultures if you don't do it you are a pussy. At least what you see is true. What you see in EU is a lie.
I thought 35%ish in the US was bad. 56% in Russia is one of the more shocking stats I've seen about their inequality.
Just stumbled upon this site made by Matt Korostoff, a software developer from the U.S. It's not about Europe, but very illuminating.
I visit Prague often. I don't know that I have enough exposure to feel like I should have known, but still I'm very surprised by the Czech Rep.
I live in the Czech Republic and I did expect it to be worse than Poland, Hungary or France, but not by that much. I assume the terrible way communism scarred us and the rushed privatization, as well as opportunistic behavior (especially in Bohemia) have their ripple effects.
Here in Portugal we specialize in making rich foreigners even richer (with things like Golden Visa and a crazilly overinflated housing market that's even causing some of the worst birthrates in Europe to become even worse, and which mainly makes money for foreign "investors") hence most of "our" 1% aren't even local or resident in the country.
Also and not at all specifically for Portugal, the real rich can and do use transnational accounting tricks to look like they're in fact very poor (such as the "poor" owner of IKEA who didn't even paid tax in Sweden because he offically owned nothing, though a Foundation in Luxembourg which just so happenned to own IKEA through a complex corporate structure, paid for his life of luxury) so what you see in this chart is mostly not the trully rich but rather the upper middle class.
(This is also, by the way, how the UK has such "low" wealth in the 1% according to this chart: in the country whose capital is the money laundromat of Europe, even mildly rich people can easilly make sure they're accounting-poor who live of handouts from some charity based in the Channel Islands which just so happens to only ever use the income from its assets - gifed to it tax free by these now "poor" person - to pay for the luxuries of said "poor" person and whose statutes make sure this "poor" person controls it ... oh and by the way, some are such huge hypocrites that they loudly proclaim that they "give all their money to Charity")
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
The 1% is not as telling as the 20% by comparison with 34.9% versus 86% respectively.
But clueless people online always tell me that Sweden is a socialist country. You're not telling me those people were full of shit, are you??
Democratic socialism is still socialism (It's a bit broad to explain what it exactly means as it can range from wanting to achieve socialism through elections to not considering capitalist democracy as democracy and wanting to revolutionize into an actual democracy). That's not the thing Nordic countries have. Nordic countries have social democracy, which is a form of capitalism where the government puts emphasis on social programs.
Social democracy can look great, because you can end up with a welfare state like the nordic countries did. But it's not really trying to get rid of capitalism, it only tries to alleviate the problems capitalism causes.
