[Chopera]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9993790/Wealth-tax-to-pay-for-EU-bail-outs.html

Senior advisers to Chancellor Angela Merkel are pushing for better-off households to pay towards the cost of any future bail-outs for the weaker members of the single currency.
The proposals, from members of Germany’s council of economic experts, raise the prospect of taxes being imposed on property in a country like Spain if its government was forced to seek a bail-out.

…

(I bet this article has made everyone’s Monday morning complete on the costas 😈 )

Oh yes – and I wonder if they realise that most of the remaining wealthy property owners are in Mallorca, and are German?

[angie]

Extra property taxes have been muted in the UK and generally in other countries for some while now. It’s such an obvious route for Governments/Councils to go, fixed assets are what these bankrupt countries seem to be going after, you can’t avoid them, like the Greek tax raised through electricity bills. Right or wrong, extra wealth taxes are coming in by stealth it seems, they want your money whether on deposit or in property, petrol and diesel etc 🙄

[Chopera]

I agree Angie. In fact I’m a supporter of land taxes (as a replacement for income taxes) so I’m personally not complaining about this too much. Funny how on the “Thatcher thread” people are debating the pros and cons of the “right to buy” schemes, when I suspect much of the money gained from buying council houses on the cheap ended up in Spanish property, and may now end up being taxed in order to bailout the eurozone. I bet Thatcher never thought she’d be saving the euro when she introduced “right to buy”!

[Anonymous]

‘Squeeze them till the pips squeak,’ is what a Labour minister said all those years ago. Now the Conservatives are saying it too.

The whole world is drowning in debt and getting the rich to pay more taxes is what most governments are advocating, though I think it might still drown. They can’t tax their money because if they try, the rich will just move it to the next tax haven, so now we have the ‘mansion’ tax – they’ve got to live somewhere and houses are more difficult to move around.

If this one fails, the next experiment may be one of inflation, memories are short and who remembers taking their pay home in a wheelbarrow?

Some extremely old Germans might.

[Author]

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