If you are a citizen of any EU Member State, I implore you to consider signing the Tax-the-Rich citizens' initiative:
https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/

The idea is to tax the super rich and then use the money for climate transition.

This is an official EU citizens' initiative, meaning that if it reaches certain thresholds, it *will have to be* considered by the EU institutions. That's a really powerful tool, if actually used.

So we should use it.

#TaxTheRich #EU

Yes, it's a JS-heavy website with a webdesign that makes my eyes hurt. Sigh, can't have nice things, can we?

You can skip right to the signing by going to the relevant Citizens' Initiatives website on europa.eu here:
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/038/public/

Both sites seem to work fine in a Tor Browser, and the signing requires solving a self-hosted captcha (no Big Tech captcha involved, it seems), so at least that's good.

#TaxTheRich #EU

> It could never work, because the rich can move / have already moved their wealth elsewhere.

Any such issue is very complex. There are always several things that need to happen to "fix" them.

So, if you react like this to any single attempt ­— "this can't work, as there are other issues to solve first" — then nothing ever gets fixed.

That's basically nihilism. You do you, but if you are so certain it can't work, why even bother commenting on this at all? 🤔

@rysiek Lots of people these days are focused on "not" something. You propose a solution (whether it's politics, or technical, or culture whatever) and their reply is "not that." It's easy to say "not that". It's hard to say "we want this" and actually have a viable, workable solution.

When someone replies to my suggestion with "not that" I just immediately reply with "what do we do instead?" Frequently they don't know.

Nobody would live in a house if everyone said "not a cave, not a hut, not a hole in the ground, not a tree, not a bush..." You can't arrive at "I want to live in a house" by naming all the things you DON'T want to live in.

@rysiek This is generally an interesting proposal. Though the regulations will have to be pretty tight. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

The general problem with taxing the wealthy was always that they could just likely evade the tax by moving to another country in the EU or using one of the various loopholes, that just exist.

Taking this on at european level makes that more difficult for sure. Though Switzerland and Great Britian still exist as "safe harbours" in Europe (since both of them are not part of the EU and you live very comfortable there).

Another thing to generally keep in mind is that wealth tax is a fairly difficult tax to a) actually determine since there is a lot of different assets and b) to actually collect since likely not all wealth should be taxed.

We had such a tax in germany like almost 30 years at this point. Collegues at work that I asked about said that the tax quite bad to determine...

So it will be interesting to see if this comes to fruition and how they will solve the challenges associated with it (and how many loopholes they conviently "forget" in there)