I guess I'm in the weird position of being a leftist who is generally against wealth taxes. Taxing non-liquid wealth like this requires the government to be able to accurately assess the value of these assets and that's an unrealistic burden IMO. I would rather address the "Buy, Borrow, Die" paradigm from other angles, like restricting the classes of assets one can borrow money against to force liquidation and therefore be subject to a traditional capital gains tax instead. That way the market takes care of the problem of pricing the asset and society can impose a tax on that valuation.
What all these people fail to mention is that at about the same time as the increase in wealth tax, another tax rule was made stricter. Before nov. 29 2022, you could take your unrealized profits abroad for five years to reset your cost basis for the realized gains tax. Meaning you could essentially spend five years to get rid of your tax burden. This tax amount is significantly larger than the wealth tax. And many of these 100 people moved before that.
Is the Norwegian government’s theory that a modern company might never realize their gains, and avoid taxation indefinitely, and thus this is a forcing mechanism to extract some tax revenue?
I don't know how a company could avoid all taxes. They say that Amazon does, but that's only the corporate income tax, surely they are paying billions in payroll, property, energy, and other taxes.
Stop throwing subsidies. Easy fix without a wealth tax.
There are a plethora of taxes that companies pay, but a tax on existence is just awful in so many ways. Make zero dollars this year? You lose a percent of the company -- congrats.
There is a middle ground: Make using the securities of the company as collateral a taxable event. If it's good enough to back a loan, it's wealth, realized.
The wealth tax targets millionaires who structure their income so they don't pay income or corporate tax, but can't avoid owning assets like company shares and property. Loss-making startups with unicorn level valuations are a tiny edge case.
I'd much rather there be a pre-tax on loans rather than a wealth tax to prevent premature liquidation. The former makes sense: if you borrow money, you should pre-pay the tax you would pay once you pay off the loan, or at least some fixed minimum percent that can raised or lower at the time the loan is paid off. And get rid of the stupid step up in basis on death.
A wealth tax on unrealized assets is going to create huge distortions in the economy, there are other ways we can fix this.
So, let me see if I understand this right: They took an investment of 70M at a valuation of 1000M, in a country that has a well-known 1% tax of valuation, but they failed to write payment of that tax into the funding papers and fled the country to dodge a 10M annual tax bill.
To their complaint: Norway is exceedingly hostile to investments that do not result in Norwegian economic investment beyond the borders of a given business. The 1% tax on virtual wealth is explicitly targeting theoretical unicorns to ensure that VC funding is taxed. Here, the first year’s effective tax would have been 10M owed out of 70M invested, at 14%. Whether that’s excessive or not for an investment is worth discussing in the context of Norway’s normal corporate tax rate, 22-25%, which they do not do. I shouldn’t have had to do this math: their post, if it’s seriously intended to influence economic policy, should have at minimum laid out these figures.
To their emotions: Were they not consulting with an accountant and a lawyer when they accepted the investment? Did they knowingly accept the investment and begin planning their exit from the country immediately? Is this a planned marketing campaign that uses taxation outrage to generate free PR for their company among taxation-hostile audiences that are more likely to pay a cryptocoin investment product?
Given the data-free post and the apparent naïveté of their founder when faced with investment and taxation in Norway, when the focus of the business on providing investment advice — either this business deserves to collapse due to its founder’s incompetence, or this post is a honeypot trap for extracting PR wealth from the cryptocoin faithful. The post presents no new arguments against Norway’s valuation tax that weren’t already hashed out at length when it was first imposed, so I decline to give them free PR by engaging with their outrage.
ps. While I largely disagree with Rand’s views, I am not unfamiliar with them. The implicit but unstated framing of their cryptocoin investor product as a peer of Reardon steel or Taggart Transcontinental here is laughable. No product is produced that stands above and apart from its peers, the customers are exclusively what Rand labels ‘moochers’, and their post is a mockery of the impassioned monologues of Atlas. They certainly would not be invited to the Gulch.
> There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Magazines all over the world talk about the wealth of business owners as if it is equivalent to the wealth of say sports stars or musicians, who get paid millions to their bank accounts.
Forbes and other finance magazines create top lists and bio stories presented entirely as if the valuations of businesses are the same as actual money. When Amazon shares go up or down a few percent overnight it's reported in the media as if a convoy of trucks has dumped dollar bills at Bezos' mansion. "Bezos made xx millions per minute".
Spreading such misinformation everywhere for decades can't be good, and it seems Norway has fallen victim to it.
So what's the point of taxing unrealized gains specifically? Why not wait until the gains are realized, tax them then, and still collect on average the same tax income? This would result in the same yearly tax income for the government, except in the years immediately after implementing or increasing unrealized gains taxes.
Is it just to force entrepreneurs to sell more stock and get more loans, as a gift to the financial sector?
How narcissistic do you have to be to come up with a title like this about yourself?
It reminds me of that study that found that people who serve in executive roles for prolonged periods of time develop a sort of brain damage where their "mirroring" neural process becomes impaired.
the author founded dune.com which is a crypto onchain data company. there is a focus on ethereum, solana, tron, stablecoins, prediction markets and the like.
the viral tweets critizing the wealth tax are by elon musk, marc andreessen, paul graham and alex svanevik (also an onchain data founder). certainly what they have in common here is that they would stand to lose some wealth from the wealth tax!
The other thing they have in common is building large scale organizations that do difficult things, bring value to millions of people and employ thousands
Invoking Atlas Shrugged and "the government is punishing the most productive, wealth-generating members of society!" when you run a shitcoin startup is hysterical. Musk is a scumbag but at least he builds real rockets and electric cars. The author of this article lets people arbitrage monkey JPEGs and has the gall to complain about being taxed on it.
Musk doesn't build anything. By all accounts he is incompetent as an engineer and managed to fail upwards into the right subsidies to save his businesses multiple times. All of his ventures have relied on government funding. SpaceX and even Tesla almost died multiple times and were barely rescued by massive bailouts by the government (aka us. our taxpayer money).
If you hire competent people and get billions in support, you'd have to be massively incompetent to not end up with an actual product.
> Norway's entrepreneurs are now indeed disappearing from society. In the past two years alone, a staggering 100 of Norway's top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50% of that group's wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.
This sounds like amazing success. Now no one has to worry about those people using their money to command Norway's significant resources to implement their stupid ideas. Money is not a resource. It's IOU from the society to the guy with money. Pushing the rich out of the country is letting someone else pay for those IOUs with their work and resources.
If you think it's a loss because those people might have great ideas because they got some in the past that made them rich, it's usually not the case. To land on the very top you need very significant amount of luck. And luck is something that you get case by case. So they have about as good ideas as next 10000 people that didn't have as much luck. But the blast radius of the stupid ideas of those on the very top is huge because of how much money they accumulated. Pushing them out of the country is a huge benefit.
TL;DR: Norway imposes a wealth tax that taxes unrealized gains at approximately 1% annually. "Wealth" here includes the book value of private companies, which presents cash flow problems for founders of startups with high paper valuations (like the author, who founded unicorn Dune Analytics).
I'm still finding it hard to be terribly sympathetic towards the author, and the constant Ayn Rand references don't help. If you're worth 100 million dollars on paper, is it really that hard to come up with 1 million to pay the taxman? Sell 1% of those shares, get a loan secured by those shares, etc.
Not to mention that the general findings from Norway's wealth tax is that it works. A few millionaire's leave but the benefit far outweighs the cost of some capital flight
I still prefer Warren's proposal in the US which only proposed a tax above a net worth of $50m. The biggest criticism of wealth taxes is the massively complicated added bureaucratic burden of measuring everyone's wealth. Only about 0.14% of USians have a net worth above $50m.
Thank goodness it’s $50 million because if it were a quarter of that then $174,000/year salaried senator Elizabeth Warren, worth $12 million, would be liable too.
Let's revisit the very first sentence of the article.
> Recently, my story as a Norwegian entrepreneur facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income went viral, amassing over 100 million views on X.
There's contributing to society, and there's receiving demands for more wealth than you possess. If you can't make a moral distinction between the two, then, frankly, I don't know how to explain it to you - this is one of those things that you should understand by the age of ten or so.
Good, productive wealth is expected to accumulate value over time, for example by being invested in someone else's equity or in a worthwhile business venture. If you're sitting on capital that isn't doing that, you've functionally taken it out of the economy, and a well-designed system punishes that.
The teenagey reference to Atlas Shrugged, a book that hails selfishness as the highest human virtue, coupled with the sloppy writing makes me highly suspicious of the competence of the author. Good riddance for Norway I guess.
Sort of like how the medieval world relied on a small class of aristocratic landowners who loved riding fast horses and killing each other, the postmodern world relies on a small class of people from all walks of life who will work much harder than usual to make more money than they need, operating large enterprises to solve various material problems of other people that they don't really need to be solving, paying tax on those enterprises that they could otherwise avoid if the were not working so much.
Thats a real big difference in how socialists vs ryandian people view the world.
The Ayn Rand philosophy holds that the people at the top are working hundreds or thousands of times harder than the rest of us.
The modern socialist view is completely contradictory, where most of the people at the top are supposed to be doing even less than a construction worker, but they're rich because of the return on capital or the right to extract some sort of rent.
This is an empirical question. 10 seconds of googling suggests CEOs work about 60 hours/week average: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/harvard-study-what-ceos-do-a... so harder than the average employee, but I'm not sure by what measure anyone believes they work 100x harder.
Perhaps the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO is 100-1000000x the average worker's productivity, or even more. I suspect the real disagreement is: does that justify paying a CEO 10-100000x more than the average worker, even if they only work 1.5x as hard? From the perspective of a company it may be worthwhile, but I can see how some people might feel that's a little unfair.
>Perhaps by realizing a portion of the gains and handing over the resulting wealth?
That means the state forces you to sell your company if people start to believe in it. Why can't they instead tax you once you do realize the gains of your own free will?
Sell to who? The company is loss-making. Investors WANT the founder to have shares so that the founder is invested in being the force behind making the company NOT loss-making.
Oh yeah that’s easy! Why didn’t he think of that earlier? /s
For those who don’t know, just because you have a valuable asset, e.g. stock in a private company, that does not necessarily mean you can sell it for cash. I’ve experienced this the hard way throughout my career
> High income with short work days, free healthcare, free daycare, free education and beyond.
If the author doesn't value these for the people around them then perhaps he should move somewhere else.
1: https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/taxes/tax-deduction-ca...
https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/
You have to take that into account and look at the NET of what we've paid Amazon vs what they've paid us
There are a plethora of taxes that companies pay, but a tax on existence is just awful in so many ways. Make zero dollars this year? You lose a percent of the company -- congrats.
There is a middle ground: Make using the securities of the company as collateral a taxable event. If it's good enough to back a loan, it's wealth, realized.
Don’t tax us and we’ll bring jobs to your area.
A wealth tax on unrealized assets is going to create huge distortions in the economy, there are other ways we can fix this.
To their complaint: Norway is exceedingly hostile to investments that do not result in Norwegian economic investment beyond the borders of a given business. The 1% tax on virtual wealth is explicitly targeting theoretical unicorns to ensure that VC funding is taxed. Here, the first year’s effective tax would have been 10M owed out of 70M invested, at 14%. Whether that’s excessive or not for an investment is worth discussing in the context of Norway’s normal corporate tax rate, 22-25%, which they do not do. I shouldn’t have had to do this math: their post, if it’s seriously intended to influence economic policy, should have at minimum laid out these figures.
To their emotions: Were they not consulting with an accountant and a lawyer when they accepted the investment? Did they knowingly accept the investment and begin planning their exit from the country immediately? Is this a planned marketing campaign that uses taxation outrage to generate free PR for their company among taxation-hostile audiences that are more likely to pay a cryptocoin investment product?
Given the data-free post and the apparent naïveté of their founder when faced with investment and taxation in Norway, when the focus of the business on providing investment advice — either this business deserves to collapse due to its founder’s incompetence, or this post is a honeypot trap for extracting PR wealth from the cryptocoin faithful. The post presents no new arguments against Norway’s valuation tax that weren’t already hashed out at length when it was first imposed, so I decline to give them free PR by engaging with their outrage.
ps. While I largely disagree with Rand’s views, I am not unfamiliar with them. The implicit but unstated framing of their cryptocoin investor product as a peer of Reardon steel or Taggart Transcontinental here is laughable. No product is produced that stands above and apart from its peers, the customers are exclusively what Rand labels ‘moochers’, and their post is a mockery of the impassioned monologues of Atlas. They certainly would not be invited to the Gulch.
> There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
-- John Rogers
Everytime it's the same.
Forbes and other finance magazines create top lists and bio stories presented entirely as if the valuations of businesses are the same as actual money. When Amazon shares go up or down a few percent overnight it's reported in the media as if a convoy of trucks has dumped dollar bills at Bezos' mansion. "Bezos made xx millions per minute".
Spreading such misinformation everywhere for decades can't be good, and it seems Norway has fallen victim to it.
Is it just to force entrepreneurs to sell more stock and get more loans, as a gift to the financial sector?
It reminds me of that study that found that people who serve in executive roles for prolonged periods of time develop a sort of brain damage where their "mirroring" neural process becomes impaired.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-c...
the viral tweets critizing the wealth tax are by elon musk, marc andreessen, paul graham and alex svanevik (also an onchain data founder). certainly what they have in common here is that they would stand to lose some wealth from the wealth tax!
If you hire competent people and get billions in support, you'd have to be massively incompetent to not end up with an actual product.
See for yourself how much we've paid him:
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor...
Not to mention the limitless violations he's faced little to no consequences for
https://violationtrackerglobal.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/spac...
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/violation-tracker...
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=tesla-inc...
This sounds like amazing success. Now no one has to worry about those people using their money to command Norway's significant resources to implement their stupid ideas. Money is not a resource. It's IOU from the society to the guy with money. Pushing the rich out of the country is letting someone else pay for those IOUs with their work and resources.
If you think it's a loss because those people might have great ideas because they got some in the past that made them rich, it's usually not the case. To land on the very top you need very significant amount of luck. And luck is something that you get case by case. So they have about as good ideas as next 10000 people that didn't have as much luck. But the blast radius of the stupid ideas of those on the very top is huge because of how much money they accumulated. Pushing them out of the country is a huge benefit.
I'm still finding it hard to be terribly sympathetic towards the author, and the constant Ayn Rand references don't help. If you're worth 100 million dollars on paper, is it really that hard to come up with 1 million to pay the taxman? Sell 1% of those shares, get a loan secured by those shares, etc.
https://www.reuters.com/business/norways-wealth-tax-trades-m...
I still prefer Warren's proposal in the US which only proposed a tax above a net worth of $50m. The biggest criticism of wealth taxes is the massively complicated added bureaucratic burden of measuring everyone's wealth. Only about 0.14% of USians have a net worth above $50m.
The 1935 Revenue Tax was essentially a wealth tax and it brought great levels of prosperity as well as continued entrepreneurship
You are not a fugitive, just because you are expected to contribute to society.
> Recently, my story as a Norwegian entrepreneur facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income went viral, amassing over 100 million views on X.
There's contributing to society, and there's receiving demands for more wealth than you possess. If you can't make a moral distinction between the two, then, frankly, I don't know how to explain it to you - this is one of those things that you should understand by the age of ten or so.
Net income != wealth.
Not sure it’s good riddance that they’re turning away their own citizens over such a small, likely unnecessary(?), tax.
The Ayn Rand philosophy holds that the people at the top are working hundreds or thousands of times harder than the rest of us.
The modern socialist view is completely contradictory, where most of the people at the top are supposed to be doing even less than a construction worker, but they're rich because of the return on capital or the right to extract some sort of rent.
Perhaps the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO is 100-1000000x the average worker's productivity, or even more. I suspect the real disagreement is: does that justify paying a CEO 10-100000x more than the average worker, even if they only work 1.5x as hard? From the perspective of a company it may be worthwhile, but I can see how some people might feel that's a little unfair.
…Perhaps by realizing a portion of the gains and handing over the resulting wealth?
That means the state forces you to sell your company if people start to believe in it. Why can't they instead tax you once you do realize the gains of your own free will?
If any government wants a cut of people’s equity they should be bankrolling it in the first place.
This seems incompatible with the claim of "unrealized gains".
For those who don’t know, just because you have a valuable asset, e.g. stock in a private company, that does not necessarily mean you can sell it for cash. I’ve experienced this the hard way throughout my career
Then how can you claim it is valuable?