Swiss voters on Sunday decisively rejected a call to require women to do national service in the military, civil protection teams or other forms, as all men must do already.
Official results. with counting still ongoing in some areas after a referendum, showed that more than half of Switzerland’s cantons, or states, had rejected the “citizen service initiative” by wide margins. That meant it was defeated, because proposals need a majority of both voters and cantons to pass.
Voters also heavily rejected a separate proposal to impose a new national tax on individual donations or inheritances of more than 50 million francs ($62 million), with the revenues to be used to fight the impact of climate change and help Switzerland meet its ambitions to have net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Insane that any democracy would reject an inheritance tax
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the problem how i understood is, that we are not only talking about cash money but also money that is in businesses. family owned businesess may then be forced to sell their business to shareholder owned foreign corpos, because they could not afford it due to the tax. that sparked some major fear among voters. the result was not even close, it was 78% No! thats hughe and beyond any left/right worldview, not a single canton voted yes, that alone is a clear indicator that this bill was not very well-thought-out
Not that insane. Most people only concern themselves with their own issues. And if you’re a 40 year old whose childhood home is now worth 500k or whatever and you have to pay 200k in taxes in order to inherit it, then you probably want to vote against it because otherwise the government will take it.
Okay, take all that with a grain of salt because I’m not too familiar with inheritance law, but it’s based on multiple similar stories I’ve heard from people.
I still think it should be taxed, don’t get me wrong. But I understand why people are against it.
The text indicates that it’s only on inheritances greater than 62 million dollars
Yeah, it’s true that in this case most people would never have to care about that. When I replied I was thinking about inheritance taxes in general. My bad.
Maybe the people wanted to have actual social services provided to them instead of climate action.
They could light the money on fire and it would still be worth impleminating
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Because it is theft. If my parents are successful and pay their taxes why is it fair to double tax a child’s inheritance. You tax earnings and income. You don’t the same money multiple times.
It’s more important to prevent an aristocracy than it is to be fair.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be fair as well as tax the rich.
Over 60 Million dollars is a lot of money. More money than your kid needs to live comfortably and never have to work ever again. That’s so much money you are creating a family that never has to experience the life of a normal person and can use that money to influence politics to compound that effect.
How much money does a person need to live comfortably without having to contribute labor? 2-5 million? Is living in luxury but not so much that someone who’s never had a real job can just buy elections unfair?
You are presenting issues that are irrelevant to the tax. Yes those things you mentioned are unfair and should be regulated accordingly. Those are irrelevant to an inheritance tax. If you want to create a wealth tax over a certain amount that’s fine but call a spade a spade. Don’t hide it as inheritance tax and allow wealthy people to hide their money in other ways like trusts and businesses.
Thing is the same money does regularly get taxed multiple times. You get shafted on money as it comes to you (income tax) and u get shafted on that money once you spend it to (sales tax). Hell I bought a house and will get to pay taxes on that annually for as long as I own it, despite already paying my state and fed govt taxes.
Just because everyone is getting fucked doesn’t mean it’s right. Double taxing only hurts the poor because they can’t hide money in tax free investments or businesses that they use to write off expenses.
Why is that insane? Wasn’t tax already paid on that money once?
This bullshit-argument again.
Guess what, money will circle around the economy and it will be taxed on different occasions and often several times during its lifespan (whatever that means for todays mostly digital money anyways). Especially when things (or money) change owners, tax is to be expected.
When you got paid, you paid income tax, and when you buy stuff with it - oh my gosh! - taxes again!! (In the form of VAT) Outrageous!
This is such a common thing, that it simply baffles me how anyone could think that “that money has been taxed already” is a sound argument.
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And how do you pay that price? With money. This is pure sophism.
And, duh, you can avoid paying taxes if you cheat… that’s not exclusive to VAT.
And you are further elaborating my point. You will be taxed on different occasions even when the money or asset doesn’t even change ownership. That’s my whole point. The argument that you already paid taxes on some money isn’t really a solid point against inheritance tax, it’s a common occurence in many areas of life. Yet it always comes up when inheritance tax is discussed.
Just like your example with the inheritance of a small home that will ruin the recipient. The example is always constructed in bad faith with a lousy tax policy in the first place. No one is trying to ruin the average joe who happens to inherit grampas house. A better design, and the one all supporters of inheritance tax I know argue for, is one with a reasonably high allowance, to avoid these scenarios, and even if you cross the allowance threshhold by a little bit, you only have to pay the fictious 20% on the amount exceeding the allowance. So say we have an (unreasonably low, but just for the sake of the example) allowance of 400K, now you inherit that 500K property you’ll have to pay (500K-400K)x0.2=20K.
If you wanted to protect small inheritances even more, you could design a progressive tax, too.
This, with a much more reasonable allowance sounds a bit like your so called ‘better solution’.
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And that is the point of inheritance tax. There might be other means to achieve that same goal, but I suspect inheritance tax is politically more realistic. In our western societies theres a deeply ingrained narrative of ‘rags to riches’ and how the rich earned their money because they contribute so much to society and worked hard for it, coupled with the wishful thinking of ‘it might be me some day’. I don’t have to preach, how flawed those ideas are, but it is much easier within that ideology to argue for an inheritance tax, where it is obvious that the heir didn’t have to do anything to really deserve it.
Wealth tax needs a bit more of a marxist understanding of economic mechanisms.
It should have been.