This trend is increasing across the whole continent and it's extremely bleak. The only growth sector in all of Europe is government spending. Aging populations mean social outlays are increasing every year, while the private sector is being actively looted by governments, stifled, and chased away so the economy isn't growing enough to fund the increasing social welfare demands.

Somehow my child understands that money must be earned before it can be taken away and redistributed, but the adults with PhDs can't figure this one out.

It's a death spiral of deficits, political instability, and more stupid policy like increasing taxes in countries that already have the highest taxes in the world.

Luckily Norway has oil wealth so they could probably afford to completely kill their private sector and chase away all private capital. It will just deepen their status as a petro-state. Becoming white Saudi Arabia is a bizarre goal for socialist politicians who also claim to be "moral" and care about "the environment." But as the saying goes, the children of wealth tend to make dumb decisions.

You're talking about taxing income but the wealth tax is not a tax on the income. Wealthy individuals pay MUCH lower taxes (in terms of the effective tax rate) than poor oflr middle-class people.

A good example of that is the UK, where the income is taxed up to 65% (marginal tax rate between £125k and £150k) while at the same millionaire getting their money from capital gains is taxed between 24% and 32%. Of course unless the money if funneled through the shell companies (common) and the effective rate dips well under 10%

As a person who pays their tax id like wealthy individuals to pay the same rate. Simple as that.

You're talking about rates as if they are fungible, conflating income taxes, capital gains taxes, and wealth taxes. These all have different implementations and ideally different purposes, so the rates should be different.

Specifically, your UK example is just wrong. For 2022–23, the average rate of income tax paid was: Basic-rate taxpayers:10% of their income Higher-rate taxpayers:22% Additional-rate taxpayers (the very top):38%

So on average, the rich pay a higher effective income-tax rate than middle earners, not “much lower”. In the UK, roughly 60% of all income tax is paid by the top 10% of earners, and about 30% by the top 1%.

Because of the double taxation via a 25% corporation tax, for a typical UK investor, tax on capital income is often in the 40–50% range, depending on how the gain is classed.