Contract manufacturers vs board stuffers

Not you or me but the guy with two million Euros is talking north of 20k here. That's some real money.

Asset taxes that take away regardless of whether there was any profit are always a bad idea. It erodes peoples' savings. But regardless of what the percentage is, people lose trust in government when that is imposed. Who's guaranteeing that they won't raise that to 2%, 3%, 5% or whatever they want some day? The goal is to force the people to declare their actual holdings, not just the income. Now that the people have obliged they have become, financially, "glass citizens". The government knows what they own and probably even where it is.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Not to mention that if you tax wealth there is little reason to accumulate wealth. It encourages consumption over savings/investment. Inflation is the same thing.

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Why?

So does inflation. And people should be investing, rather than saving.

Perhaps. But they haven't, and this is a democratic society, so we'd throw them out if they did.

We certainly have to declare our banks accounts, wherever they are, and how much money is in them at the turn of the financial year. I can't see this as intrinsically bad. If the government went bad, and someone like Nixon got his hands on the levers of power, there are obvious disadvantages, but not having any government at all is not an option.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Perhaps. But a tax that diminishes your wealth at half the rate that inflation does isn't going to make much difference to people's behaviour.

In fact, being ostentatiously wealthy has always been expensive, and this doesn't seem to have discouraged anybody from accummulationg wealth and flaunting it.

Thieves - motivated by private greed - are always attracted to accumulations of wealth, and don't have any social inhibitions about grabbing all they can take away, and that has never inhibited the accumulation of wealth.

People don't accumulate wealth for the sake of being wealthy - they accumulate it to allow them to buy things that they find important, most frequently, social status.

Paying taxes can be seen as just such a purchase of social status.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen 

> It encourages consumption over savings/investment.  Inflation is the 
> same thing.

We don't in the USA. We have to declare interest income, but not account balances. The US taxes income, not wealth.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

I wrote that. This is why:

Investing into what? The stock market? That choice should be left to everyone on a personal level.

There are people who save for old age, at which point they start spending their savings. Then there are those who don't give a hoot and just plop themselves into welfare later. I prefer the first group.

AFAIK you just accepted another two percentage points on top of you already high VAT. Beats me why but I do not live there anymore so it doesn't affect me.

It should suffice to report the earnings. But leftists want to have glass citizens and they are typically the ones wanting to know everything about them.

You did not learn from history, did you? For example the de-facto confiscation of peoples' gold over here. There are still older people who do not trust any institution and keep their assets under a mattress or something.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

If you have foreign accounts you do, though. Courtesy of ... you know whom :-)

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

government

That's crazy. How many people show their bank balances or tax returns to friends and to the public? Nobody that I know. There are people who

*spend* to achieve social status (fancy cars, big houses, opera dresses, golf clubs) but that's the opposite of accumulating wealth; most such status is bought on borrowed money.

The major reason to save is not to spend, not for social status: it's for security. Or for college tuition for the kids.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

ote:

late

From a historical perspective it's certainly true, and in small communities it's well known who's well-off and who's not. Getting prosecuted as a tax evader get your name in the paper and definitely diminishes your social standing. Maybe you'd have preferred that I'd expressed the idea by saying that paying taxes is a way of avoiding the humiliation of being prosecuted as a tax evader?

That's certainly one sort of social status, and if you borrow too much and get declared bankrupt it rather undoes the good impression that you've borrowed to create.

krw wasn't actually talking about saving, but about "accumulating wealth" which is presumably what you have done by making a success of Highland Technology Inc. Did you do that for security? Or for college tuition for your kids? Both are incidental - if valuable - side effects of building up the business, but I doubt if those two considerations informed every choice you made along the way.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Perfectly correct. But it makes more sense invest your saving by buying shares than it does to leave the money in a bank account or stuff it under that mattress.

Don't we all. But the latter group aren't either investing or saving, so don't come into this discussion,

r

That's the way the election came out. The Socialist Party might have undone the 2% VAT hike (from 19% to 21%) but not enough people were prepared to vote for them.

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That's a point of view, but not one that excites enough of the Dutch voting population to have gotten onto the list things that politicians will campaign about.

The tax authorities aren't on the habit of publishing the details of people's tax returns. It's not a issue that anybody seems to take very seriously, so I don't know the various party policies on the subject. Your imagined "leftists" may be infinitely curious, but if it's PvdA (Dutch Labour Party, supported by the trade unions) policy it isn't prominent in their campaign literature.

I just quoted you an example from recent history, and I know the sorts of things that have happened from time to time. What you are complaining about is that I don't interpret what I know in a way that fits with your point of view.

As long as the government looks more or less honest and effective, it makes sense to figure that they will continue to be more or less honest and effective. If they look like going bad, then it's time to emigrate, hide your money under the mattress and so forth - but don't let some false prophet persuade you to do it prematurely.

It's a point of view - a more than slightly crazy point of view, but there are plenty of lunatics around, and quite a few post regularly here.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

government

You are very wrong about that. There have been cases where some fat six-digit sum has been found hidden on a deceased persons's property, or a huge stash of gold. Sure those people are saving. I don't think this is a good idea but some people do that.

That's a good thing. The increase in the VAT is not a good thing.

Socialists would never say that openly. But their ultimate goal is usually a most thorough control of everything in people's lives by the government.

Sorry, but then I'd have to opine that you are naive on that point.

Then it's too late. I made that decision about 35 years ago and have not regretted it. I really like the culture in the Netherlands but I did not like the government and the high taxes much.

A few years ago a financial expert wondered why I was so under-invested in stocks. Then a real estate pro thought I'd be crazy not to borrow money and invest in real estate. Both have subsequently hit bottom and both lost their homes.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

There are TV shows where gobs-O-cash and other goodies have been found in places being readied for razing.

I would love to be a collector of antiques or salvage. One of my ancestors had a junk yard back in the '50s. I like old cars, but an old electronic gear and gadget salvage shop would be cool.

Old electronic gear is cool but also big. Since I am pretty sure that nobody in the family after us wants it I donated my old tube radios and some antique lab equipment to these guys:

They'll exhibit some, and some they may sell to raise funds. Either way it'll all end up in loving hands and that was the goal.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Thranx dude. I have some stuff in that category and know people who have more and are actively looking for a home for it.

?-)

You should see Joe Walsh's collection.

He just released a new album. First since '92. "Analog Man".

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Anecdotal evidence. Every kind of lunatic exists, but the number of people who conceal significant assets in order to be able to draw welfare is pretty limited, which doesn't stop the right-wing press from publicising every - rare - occasion this is detected as if it's evidence that every welfare recipient is a cheat.

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It was the least worst solution to a problem that the then Dutch government had got themselves into, and was actually part of a quickly cobbled together cross party agreement - "the spring accord" - that enabled them to satisfy the EC rules after the negotiations within the then coalition had fallen apart due to Geert Wilders intransigence.

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Socialists don't say it openly or privately because it doesn't happen to be true. There's nothing in modern socialism's agenda that requires "thorough control of everything in people's lives". You've been living in the US for too long, where the right-wing press has always equated socialism with communism - thought the original communists were slung out of the Socialist International around 1872, with Bakunin famously predicting that they'd create worse dictatorships than the regimes they were trying to replace.

Socialists don't believe "in the leading role of the party".

d

And you've just told me that socialist's "ultimate goal is usually a most thorough control of everything in people's lives by the government" which means that you have naively swallowed a chunk of moronic right-wing propaganda. Not a great example of critical thinking.

You would have done fine if you'd stayed in the Netherlands - probably not as well as you would have done in the US, where phase-array ultrasound attracted a lot of venture capital, but from my point of view, you were an economic migrant moving to a place where your expertise was in particular demand rather than any kind of political refugee.

s

For some years now we've had enough money to hear from people who wanted to take our financial decisions for us - and collect commission on the money transfers involved. We've also had enough sense to know when they were advising us to invest in bubbles. None of them got any business out of us.

--
Bill Sloman, Njmegen

accumulate

My goodness John, how provincial you have just proven yourself to be.