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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

And let's not forget the additional money spent over the last two years on pandemic-related measures, that will already burden the tax payer for years.

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Yields on many German bonds are negative:

* https://www.investing.com/rates-bonds/germany-government-bon...

10Y bonds have been negative since April 2019, before the pandemic:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IRLTLT01DEM156N

By borrowing money Germany can actually make a 'profit'.

That's just because all the bonds are bought by the government's themselves using printed money. It doesn't actually mean Europe is in a good position financially. Inflation is rising fast and had the potential to cause ruin. Of all times it is blue that Europe is financially wrap and unable to respond, thanks to our society being unable to detect academic pseudoscience.

Printed money is also cheap as long as inflation is low.

For example it took trillions in unexpected spending to bump US inflation above the target 2%.

And yields are going to remain low because of the aging population of the "west" put their pension into stable assets, and pension funds will buy gov. bonds.

https://fullstackeconomics.com/sorry-deficit-hawks/

Negative real rates are negative real rates. The yield has been dropping in the Euro area for twenty years:

* https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/financial_markets_and_intere...

For a while you could get mortgages with negative rates:

* https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/aug/13/danish-bank-la...

Too much spending has generally not been Europe's problem.

There is a way out: tax the rich. Lindner will have to see reason eventually.

Lindner? No way. He rather kills social security than tax the rich accordingly

We are already taxing the rich though?

Some think taxing the rich is some eternal well of a problem solve.

This well can be run dry very fast, when one talks about state level spending. And once dry, and once shown that all efforts lead to naught, is stays dry.

An example? I just work less, rather than pay more tax, and lose certain tax breaks.

Why would I toil more, only to make less per hour?

one just has to identify how society determines the "rich", and how much to require. both of these are very difficult questions.

i want to tax the rich! yes, i do. lets take a reasonable share and deal with societies ill's.

let's not take all their money; just the excess that there is no reasonable chance that an individual could use it.

for example, you could raise my takes $100 a month and it would not be missed, or noticed. in Elon's case, $10M a month would be nothing.

You can't just dump all his shares into the market and expect it to absorb it.

He still pays capital gains tax when he is realizing profits though.

If you earn a wage, or otherwise rely on an earned income to live or sustain yourself, you’re not rich in the same sense that you’re using the word. Wealth and income are not the same.

The "rich" people you generally want to tax do not toil, their income is all generated by capital (aka "passive income"), not labor.

We are not. The amount of the wealth of billionaires and their number has exploded since the "golden 80s" era, and the corporate and individual tax rate has plummeted correspondingly since then.

We had so much tax money that we used to build and maintain swimming pools even in tiny villages. These days, after they had to close for lack of tax base, we have record numbers of children drowning because they have no nearby and affordable place where they can learn to swim.

We're very bad at doing it in any way that'd matter to them.

https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.57576...

sure we do, the question is of course "how".

afaik income tax is "progressive" in most nations but practically hyperbolic aka progressive in a way that is just barely true to the meaning of the word.

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