Instead of penalizing change, why not encourage it? When you work from home, you don't put anywhere near the carbon into the atmosphere that you would commuting. You also spend a lot less on lunch, and you don't need to put your children into state-run schools that are really there to function as daycare centers as much as they are to educate.
If all of that office space in downtown areas stays dark, and the zoning laws are altered or removed, it can be redeveloped into housing that's actually affordable.
We really are running into a wall on the methane crisis, and we we simply don't have the time to integrate these changes at a slower pace.
Let's focus on changing our regulations that prohibit building neighborhoods for pedestrians. Let's work on getting homes with solar roofs and big batteries. Let's get drone delivery everywhere. Let's electrify the transport system with electric cars, electric trucks, eVTOL aircraft. Let's tunnel underneath and between cities and connect them with hyperloops. Let's connect people in rural areas with low-cost, low-latency satellite internet access.
Doing these things will directly provide a great number of jobs for a great number of people. It will make a great number of new jobs possible. It will improve the natural environment. I think this is a much more positive direction to take than to try to slow things down.
I think this is an immune response by capital. If people don’t need multiple spaces for living, that has a big impact on the people who own property and land. Shifting to things like drone delivery, etc, which I think is a great idea, would be an imposition to edified capital interests. I am pessimistic that our system has the will or momentum to shift toward what individual laborers and human groups need, but it is heartening to see that the fight itself is becoming so overt.
Deutsche Bank obviously wants this tax to prop up real estate. This is a general unemployment problem yet they somehow suggest a tax that is supposed to make one type of worker worse off even though every worker should be taxed to help the unemployed? The irony is that we are in an economic situation in which we actually need the opposite: Tax cuts everywhere.
They can't help but penalize change. Work from home is a change that is resulting in much lower tax revenue, and they need new income streams to make up for it.
"It argues this is only fair, as those who work from home are saving money and not paying into the system like those who go out to work."
They simply need more people to "pay into the system" again.
I get your point, and don't disagree with it, but the analogy you used is still off. In the case of fuel taxes, they're mostly used to fund road maintenance. Since the amount of road damage (and therefore maintenance cost) increases exponentially/geometrically with axle weight[1], it doesn't make sense to tax cyclists because the amount of cost they incur is negligible. On the other hand, it does make sense to charge electric vehicles extra $$$, because they incur road wear but don't pay for it via fuel taxes.
Taxing fuel as an indicator of road use is outdated now with the advent of electric cars. There should also be additional taxes for gasoline due to the environmental costs, and the simplest way to make things fair is to stop taxing analogues and taxing directly instead.
So raise tax revenue across the board. Will that make the commuting lifestyle unaffordable? Well that might just be because it's not economically viable and heavily subsidized.
I don't believe it has anything to do with change.
I believe it has everything to do with isolating a vulnerable subset of society to exploit them. Divide and conquer. They want a bigger chunk of your hard earned money, thus they fabricate a tall tale of entitlement to vilify and turn the peole against you, and proceed to rob you of your paycheck because they want your hard earned money.
Saving money? I spending more money than before I worked from home.
More money on electricity, heating, had to get better internet etc. Spending more on food as I am snacking and drinks more at home. It's not like the employers are sharing in this increased cost. The independent owned coffee place near my home is more expensive than the coffee can buy in the work canteen.
Working in an office should be taxed to mitigate the environmental cost of such a high carbon lifestyle. Why would we tax people for avoiding paying the carbon taxes associated with the office lifestyle?
How on Earth would that help? Maybe printing money, taxing the unearthly wealth of the largest corporations that currently pay $0 or negative taxes (e.g. Amazon, Netflix, many others), and giving a federal job guarantee or some mix thereof would be better?
Adding a tax on specific behaviors will just cause these $0 paying corporations to shuffle various activities around to come out paying $0 or less.
OR...end the lockdowns and lifestyle restrictions so there are no "vulnerable jobs" to this virus that has a 0.13% IFR [1]. Human choices by governments are both creating the problem and providing solutions to the problem.
“The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.” ― Harry Browne
The fatality rate is dependent on overall infection rate, because treatment capacity is finite and once it goes above capacity people who might have lived get parked on trolleys in the hospital corridors to die.
There will be a bill to pay for lockdowns and I expect tax rises are looming but this policy is bonkers.
If some jobs have become zombified because working practices have changed then those jobs need to go. We should support those people through the transition but trying to prop up unviable businesses isn't a sensible policy.
Coming out of this period should be a period of creative destruction but it seems to me current politicians don't have the backbone for it.
I have zero faith that we will do anything productive. I am so disappointed in the human race, more specifically large businesses.
We have known for a long time, the science is solid and being updated constantly, yet large companies don't do shit.
Doesn't matter how much recycling I do (which turns out is probably a waste of time), if a fucking billion dollar company creates a huge mess in a 3rd world country and pays peanuts.
Why will there be a bill? The cost has already been paid by definition in lost output.
And when those that have saved more and borrowed less change their position taxes will automatically rise because tax is a ratio, not a fixed amount. The more activity there is, the more tax arises.
Brilliant, a bank's own think tank suggesting we have additional taxes on labour because capital suddenly finds itself more efficient. Alternatively, how about an annual levy of 0.5% on all wealth, including bank balances?
I think there may be something else going on. "Essential" work has been allowed to continue, and "essential" had basically been defined as anything directly contributing to economic output.
Meanwhile, the productive desk jobs have moved to the home. This leaves two categories of jobs high and dry, the jobs maintaining the office building, and the bullshit jobs.
The problem is that the existence of bullshit jobs is part of the current deal, and estimates range from 40-50+% of how much work in a western economy is pointless. If the bullshit jobs disappear, it threatens that model and ultimately capital holders. The people may decide to tax capital!
"The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
goons, who oppose other goons hired by other companies, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive
box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers
taskmasters, who manage—or create extra work for—those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
Deutshe Bank was in top of the list of another article that hit the homepage today, about massive international money laundering... (2Trillion) [1]
I wonder how companies are so amazing that feel they can do such evil shit with one face, and then turn with another and tell people they need to pay more taxes...
People working from home save their employers money through reduced need for space, services and consumables at offices or other business premises.
They make lesser demands of public facilities, notably reducing the load on overcrowded transport infrastructure and so improving efficiency, the environment and, particularly at the current time, the health and safety of those who do still need to travel.
They support local businesses in the areas around their homes.
Their own quality of life may be qualitatively improved, not least by getting back several hours every week that is no longer wasted on commuting. This has obvious benefits including greater personal productivity, better mental health and providing more family time for parents and children during the week.
And as a secondary benefit, forcing businesses to accept more remote working might undermine long-standing toxic practices and presenteeism culture imposed by bad management, further improving both business productivity and personal quality of life for many.
We shouldn't be taxing working from home (or working closer to home instead of in distant facilities). If anything, we should be incentivizing this shift in our way of life, and we should be adapting our planning and infrastructure policies to support doing more of it in the future for those who can and want to. That could mean anything from just allowing more small business premises within predominantly residential areas where their services are likely to be needed right up to creating local business hubs where people can set up to work, access shared facilities and enjoy some personal contact if they don't have good facilities to work literally at their own home or they prefer a more social work environment.
We're definitely going to have some big bills to pay after the coronavirus problem has been mitigated, but I can think of a lot of more reasonable ways to generate extra revenue on the required scale than this. How about some real international collaboration to establish transaction taxes on multinationals that make huge amounts of money largely by moving money and/or personal data around with little evidence of any wider societal benefit from their activities, for a start?
Obviously have no evidence for this, but the cynical side of me thinks that this bank wants to destroy working from home in order to keep people going into the office so that companies keep paying for office space. That way banks with holdings in property, property insurance, mortgages, etc. don’t lose money on their investments.
There is close to zero chance a bank, the pinnacle of capitalist institutions, supports such an inherently socialist proposal such as wealth redistribution.
Privately owned banks, which encompasses all banks in the western world, bar central banks, are the primary creators of money supply. I think that counts as a pinnacle of the capitalist system.
Or those who gained a lot from the crisis? It's not like they were planning for a pandemic; for e.g. zoom this was simply a windfall. Why not tax that?
I beg you explain. First of all, what are you going to tax? Sales / VAT tax? Revenues? Profits? Why is the existing VAT inadequate for this? Is the new tax just going forward, or is it retroactive? How much is Germany specifically supposed to tax NASDAQ:ZM, incorporated in the US?
Why just tax Zoom — Cisco, Google, and others have meeting products too (I'm stuck on WebEx, eww) so why should they be treated differently?
And if we do that, what does it say that we tax this thing that helps keep the economy from collapsing in the current crisis, punishing it financially, as if we resent it and want less of it?
Frankly I'd be fine with simply stepping up the game against tax evasion. If corporations paid their fair share to begin with, we'd have a lot less issues like this to begin with.
In terms of concretely for this year (and not being a fiscal expert, just some rando on the web, as I'm sure you're aware) I see governments giving out help to people/companies in need, based on a comparison of current incomes/profits and last year's income in the same month. Not that that's perfect, but if it is workable, I don't see why this couldn't be generalized to the case where companies (or people, but that's probably a fringe) make significantly more profit now than last year around this time. Given the broad economic problems, that should separate out the winners of the crisis quite neatly.
Paired with possibility for individual recourse, that should bring in some decent tax revenue and leave room for people who feel their increase in earnings is nothing to do with the pandemic. Of course, those people would have to make the effort to defend that case, and might also stand in the "court" of public opinion as a result.
Apart from that, I don't see why it seems a foregone conclusion that e.g. rent will have to be paid in full. That basically says "we guarantee that whatever happens, people who are well enough off to own more property than they inhabit themselves will not bear the consequences." I don't think as a hard-and-fast rule that's fair either. Because the inversion of that is "whatever happens, we'll have it be paid by those who have the least already."
Your state-capitalism solution punishes the firms which successfully adapted, to rescue the firms which were incapable of adapting. This creates substantial moral hazard and is a key reason why state-managed capitalism sees less innovation, and is instead plagued by inefficient zombie firms which make their profits off bailout funds instead of in the market. The scheme rewards the entrenched interests for running fragile operations, while shutting out new competitors who might be better or more resilient.
Mind you, these zombie firms proliferated in Europe after the 2007 crisis, so this is really nothing new. And the good news is that when you do such a thing, you can avoid more disruption. But the bad news is that doesn't leave the economy more resilient when you're done: it leaves it more fragile. In the years ahead, if Europe is further tested by crisis, we may see the real price that her people have paid, and it might very well fall hardest on those who can least afford it.
> Your state-capitalism solution punishes the firms which successfully adapted
That would be true, iff the taxes canceled the gains out entirely. Which... I never said. But that always seems to be the expectation when someone proposes to tax wealthy people. Pandemic or not, I never argue for an effective tax rate close to 100%. But I don't have to. I can argue for the effective tax rates being much, much higher than they are currently, and still stay comfortably far away from 100%. So the incentive to gain more would still be there, it just wouldn't be as strong. Not-so-incidentally, I think that would actually be a good thing.
Yeah, but if you tax more the businesses that helped sustain working from home and keept some parts of the economy going on "as normal", would that incentivise people to create other companies that have that as a goal (or even side effect)? They haven't defrauded people or robbed the money - there was more demand for their product, good for them. Are you going to also tax, for example, any farms that saw an increased demand because of different culinary choices? Apps for home workouts? Restaurants that do takeaway/delivery? Toilet paper manufacturers?
Because Deutsche has consistently gone above and beyond when it comes to hiding (or assisting others in hiding...) illegally obtained money, whether its cartel leaders, money launderers, Bernie Madoff, JEpstein, Donald... Shocking they would try to throw some shade at a quantitatively irrelevant group.
Edit: I know that name is a bit unfortunate, but it's a good book and I'm recommending it because of it's coverage of Deutsche, not for the political element - which is actually quite small.
Wow, so because I save myself and my employer money by not mindlessly commuting to work everyday I should pay an extra tax? That's one of the most ridiculous ideas I've heard so far.
It's a bit like taxing cyclists 10 % of their income because they don't support the car industry...
It is also an extremely weird organisation to suggest this sort of thing. They're definitely not an organisation looking for fairness in the world, I've only ever heard of central banks implement policies for the general benefit or taxation, and then only with great reluctance, usually after their hand got forced.
On the other hand they have a huge real estate portfolio (and mortgage portfolio) that I'm sure is now no longer looking like such a smart investment. So they're looking for them and their customers to be the recipients of these grants, no doubt.
I think the point they're trying to make is that the money you and your employer are saving is not going into the economy as it was before, which is having a net-negative effect overall.
> Quite simply, our economic system is not set up to cope with people who can disconnect themselves from face-to-face society.
So it's plausible that there is actually a problem here with the very sudden change of workforce distribution and how it affects society and the economy. But addressing it by simply taxing employers more for work-from-home jobs is definitely short-slighted. But in the short term it seems that something needs to be done to prop up the system because billions of dollars have left the economy overnight and it will likely never return.
Every business works constantly to reduce cost. How is this cost-saving any different from any other? Should a business that finds a cheaper vendor pay extra tax? And why does the money earned by remote workers, not somehow 'going into the economy'? That's a stretch.
To put some context on this, this is a “think piece”, not an official position of a large multi-national bank:
> Deutsche Bank says its research is designed to spark debate around a series of important topics.
> Report author Mr Templeman said he'd had a lot of feedback on the report.
"A lot of people aren't impressed at the idea of another tax, however, some have seen it as an interesting policy that governments can use to redistribute some of the gains from the pandemic which have been unexpectedly accrued by some people while others have lost out."
> We want to give people an economic incentive to go out and mix with people in the middle of a pandemic.
No, but we do want to incentivize those essential workers who are risking their health and who are often at or barely above minimum wage. Workers at long term care homes, grocery stores, schools, et cetera.
But such a plan is only superficially similar to the crazy Deutsche Bank plan.
If there were any problem with filling these positions, employers would offer higher wages until they could find someone to fill these "essential" roles or accept that maybe they're not so essential after all. In a properly functioning economy, people who risk their lives and do the things others are unwilling or unable to do but need to get done get paid a premium. If essential employees can't leverage their irreplaceability into higher wages, that suggests a deep systemic problem. This sort of welfare would allow the economy to get through the current crisis without addressing that problem and then get back to suppressing wages as usual.
It's the fact that a BANK is suggesting that CUSTOMERS take care of THE BANK's problems.
Their piss-poor planning is not my emergency. And if it IS my emergency, you can bet that additional taxes will not be on the table as a fix. Getting rid of the banking system and replacing it with something that works WILL be on the table, though.
Worker always pays all tax. If you get X and pay Y tax and employer also pay Z tax, the reality is that you make X+Y+Z and pay Y+Z of tax, it just happens that Z is attributed to the employer, but it makes no difference. So if the Z increases, then X and Y will decrease or if X and Y stays the same, it only means you are now making more, but the difference goes to the state purse. Now if the increase goes beyond the budget allocated for salaries, the solutions are - increase the budget, make cuts, fire someone and if employer increases the budget then you just made a rise.
I think the expectation is that employers would just reduce the salary of all WFH employees until they are paying the same amount as they were before. I would expect very few, if any, US companies would shoulder the burden themselves and keep their employees salaries the same
As an employer I would have an incentive to request works to show up in the office in order to not pay that tax.
Let’s say for a big company scaling down workspace they can offset the tax. For smaller companies it might actually be more cost effective to keep the office and demand works to come in.
Also why should anyone subsidise someone because their job requires them to be physically somewhere?
Also why stop there? Why not tax ppl who have a less stressful job? Or less mentally demanding? Or less physically demanding? And then distribute that tax around.
Honestly, I chose to be a CS because I can work from home. That was the one thing that made me switch from medicine or experimental physics. Why should I be put in a worse situation because of that. And finally I have invested heavily into creating a room in my flat that acts as an office: Multiple monitors, desk, chair, servers, gigabit internet, etc. This contribution to the economy would not have happened if I was not WFH.
Even worse, this encourages companies to needlessly maintain office space so as to shift the tax burden onto the employee. So you have the inefficiency from lost income for the employee and inefficiency of misallocated resources.
Obvious solution is to tax high earners more than low earners. If the inequality is increasing anyways, increase the amount of tax the high earners have to pay, and lower the one for low earners.
But if you're one of those high earners (that let's say works at Deutsche Bank) who sit in an office, you're not gonna write a proposal for higher tax for yourself. So instead you focus on those other people, who are "stealing" your salary by not having to go to the office anymore.
That's exactly what they're suggesting. You forget what "high earners" are and aren't. It is not the super-rich since the assets of the super-rich don't actually amount to that much compared to the total.
The state taxes where the lion's share of TOTAL wealth is (not wealth per person). That's the income of the middle class. That's why another new tax on income is suggested.
So middle class income represents 80% of the total tax income (and that's ignoring that customs duties and excise taxes also mostly come from that bucket, then we'd easily get to 85%)
"High earners" are generally defined as anyone earning more than double the average income in the country. For the US that's anyone making $62k2 = $120k per household*. Or for an individual that would be a chunk above that $62k, let's say $68k. All figures before tax, of course.
Home work improves many peoples mental state, reduces time spent at work (if you count commutes), people's footprint in terms of pollution and allow for the redistribution of people that were clustered in big cities under asfixiating rent/home owning costs. Why on earth would we disincentivize it?
>By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at restaurants near their places of work, while expensive offices remain virtually empty.
Spending your money isn't an obligation as far as I'm aware. Should I be taxed for bringing my homecooked food to work then? What about walking to my workplace, or using a bike?
>"The virus has benefitted those who can do their jobs virtually, such as bank analysts, and threatened the livelihoods or health of those who can't," added Mr Templeman.
that one is reasonable until:
>It also wouldn't apply when people are asked to stay home for a public health emergency or other medical reasons.
So..the concern is that the virus hurts some workers, but it doesn't apply during times where workers are harmed?
Singapore and Switzerland both have very low tax rates (topping out around ~ 20%), and both are great places to live. Panama is nice as well, and they top out at 25%.
Here's the thing, everyone arguing against this tax is arguing for preserving the status quo as well. This pandemic has changed our situation, on every level from global to local. It's foolish to pretend it hasn't.
I would gladly contribute a larger share of my income as taxes to ensure my community doesn't suffer, provided it was distributed equitably (which is a whole other complicated discussion.)
> I would gladly contribute a larger share of my income as taxes to ensure my community doesn't suffer (...)
I would too, which is why I vote with my wallet and buy local, even at a premium, whenever I can.
However, income tax is the exact opposite of helping out the community, as it's designed to fatten up the central government's revenue which is then used up to feed the state's current expenditure.
There is always an angle. You just have dig to find out why Douche Bank would want this. It has to benefit them some way that isn't obviously apparent. Just like Shell starting to lobby the Biden Camp to ban all methane from drilling, it's not because they care about the environment but probably to leave an adversary in a more difficult situation.
I was hoping Douchebank was going to go under. They were a candidate there for a moment at the beginning of April. Talk was they were going to fold. Too Bad.....
Because it's a stupid statement when there are companies that are making more money this year than they did ever before and that billionaires have increased their wealth by so much during this pandemic.
> Because it's a stupid statement when there are companies that are making more money (...)
Again, that makes zero sense and is another blatant red herring. If the discussion is about taxing WFH to support vulnerable jobs, it makes absolutely no sense to waste time playing the whole whack-a-mole whataboutism game.
If you don't want to discuss the topic under discussion, please refrain from commenting at all. You'll only end up adding noise to an otherwise interesting discussion.
Why not tax the corporations who stand to gain from long-term WFH? They will save millions on office space. Let's take that surplus rather than squeezing the employees yet again.
It argues this is only fair, as those who work from home are saving money and not paying into the system like those who go out to work.
By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at restaurants near their places of work, while expensive offices remain virtually empty.
This is a terrible argument that just makes a lot of assumptions without also considering the benefits. The main assumption being that "WFH" is a net drain on the local economy.
While yes, people working from home aren't paying for public transportation, or eating out every day - they are spending money other ways. For example people are using food delivery services, buying more grocery, moving to cheaper COL areas thereby supporting a local economy somewhere else. They are buying better homes or furniture or equipment, etc. We need to understand better the complete impact on the economy to determine the net gain or loss.
Also add utility bills to that. Gas, electric and water bills all increase by working from home, and for some their internet connection bills will increase as they have a need for more data and a better connection.
> > while expensive offices remain virtually empty ...
> This is a terrible argument that just makes a lot of assumptions without also considering the benefits ...
You forget who is the beneficiary of people using those expensive offices. Could it be Deutsche Bank has a huge investment into commercial real estate and is looking to be the recipient of these "grants" ?
Might Deutsche Bank be sitting on a non performing commercial real estate portfolio?
Alan Sugar (British Trump equivalent) similarly issued a demand for people to "get their asses back in the office" after telling everybody his commercial real estate portfolio wasn't performing: https://www.standard.co.uk/business/lord-sugar-offices-prope...
Hah yes this is definitely a part of it. Remote working spreads money around the country rather than concentrating it in expensive city-centres where the rich have stockpiled property.
I came here to say that it was about commercial real estate incentives and glad to see someone pointed it out. Seems like the obvious reason why someone would suggest such an otherwise ludicrous idea, backed up by such fallacious reasoning. It’s a bit of an insult that they believe anyone would fall for it.
I'm a little surprised at the number of people analyzing this idea at face value rather than wondering what their motivation was for coming up with such a bizarre idea in the first place.
If you are working, and not at the office, then you must be working from home. Or from a cafe etc. but that's the same thing in the context of this proposal.
The ideas are always around taxing the middle class, the hard working engineers, lawyers, doctors and sold to the masses as taxing "the rich", but in reality the rich never pay as much tax as middle class (as a proportion of income). Tax is often used as an instrument to discourage certain behaviour and this proposal seems to be also hitting engineers, but also people on lower income who for example assemble parts at home. It seems like the goal of DB is to discourage home working disguised as a help to those who cannot work from home.
It's kind of "we know better than you what is good and you must obey or give us your hard earned money."
Why people are not ashamed to put such proposals forward?
The problem is that there's a subset of the population that thinks taxation is inherently good and blindly goes along with the people who propose taxes for their own benefit and the people who propose taxes as a lossy way to legislate away behaviors they don't like but could never get the support for actually legislating away. The result is a baseline support for even the dumbest taxes that is too damn high. This makes bad policy seem like it has actual support when it's just the mechanism of the policy (taxes) that has support.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadIf all of that office space in downtown areas stays dark, and the zoning laws are altered or removed, it can be redeveloped into housing that's actually affordable.
We really are running into a wall on the methane crisis, and we we simply don't have the time to integrate these changes at a slower pace.
Let's focus on changing our regulations that prohibit building neighborhoods for pedestrians. Let's work on getting homes with solar roofs and big batteries. Let's get drone delivery everywhere. Let's electrify the transport system with electric cars, electric trucks, eVTOL aircraft. Let's tunnel underneath and between cities and connect them with hyperloops. Let's connect people in rural areas with low-cost, low-latency satellite internet access.
Doing these things will directly provide a great number of jobs for a great number of people. It will make a great number of new jobs possible. It will improve the natural environment. I think this is a much more positive direction to take than to try to slow things down.
"It argues this is only fair, as those who work from home are saving money and not paying into the system like those who go out to work."
They simply need more people to "pay into the system" again.
From TFA:
"By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at restaurants near their places of work"
It's exactly what the GP comment referenced.
Taxation of WFH people is like taxing vegetarians because the tax revenue from sugar tax is too low.
Edit: Also fuck banks, of course their employees suggest taxing the middle class.
How is sugar consumption related to meat eating?
Or better example if cyclists were taxes because they don't pay motor/petrol tax.
[1] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
I don't believe it has anything to do with change.
I believe it has everything to do with isolating a vulnerable subset of society to exploit them. Divide and conquer. They want a bigger chunk of your hard earned money, thus they fabricate a tall tale of entitlement to vilify and turn the peole against you, and proceed to rob you of your paycheck because they want your hard earned money.
More money on electricity, heating, had to get better internet etc. Spending more on food as I am snacking and drinks more at home. It's not like the employers are sharing in this increased cost. The independent owned coffee place near my home is more expensive than the coffee can buy in the work canteen.
People who WFH will still spend a similar amount of money, just on different things and in different places.
Paying a flat tax on all writeable media to fund GEMA. Having to use Sofortüberweisung for online payments, etc.
Looking him up on LinkedIn shows he is working in London since 2009, at DB since 2015, did an MBA in NSW, Australia and another one at LBS in London.
Adding a tax on specific behaviors will just cause these $0 paying corporations to shuffle various activities around to come out paying $0 or less.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/03/why-amazon-paid-no-federal-i...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-in... ($162 million tax bill after 2 years of $0)
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/02/13/netflix-tax-law/
“The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.” ― Harry Browne
Remote workers you get to pay for the crutch.
[1] Oct 05 WHO announces 750m cases and on that day there were ~1m fatailities. 1m / 750m = 0.0013 = 0.13% IFR ( end of article here https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/nyc-ebola-doctor... )
If some jobs have become zombified because working practices have changed then those jobs need to go. We should support those people through the transition but trying to prop up unviable businesses isn't a sensible policy.
Coming out of this period should be a period of creative destruction but it seems to me current politicians don't have the backbone for it.
We have known for a long time, the science is solid and being updated constantly, yet large companies don't do shit.
Doesn't matter how much recycling I do (which turns out is probably a waste of time), if a fucking billion dollar company creates a huge mess in a 3rd world country and pays peanuts.
/Rant
Why will there be a bill? The cost has already been paid by definition in lost output.
And when those that have saved more and borrowed less change their position taxes will automatically rise because tax is a ratio, not a fixed amount. The more activity there is, the more tax arises.
Savings are a store of taxation as well as value.
More borrowing means more debt that needs servicing.
Work it through. Government spends $100. My spending is your income less tax. Your spending is my income less tax. The tax rate is 1%.
Run out the maths, and see what tax you get. As you can see it doesn't mean less tax revenue. It means it moves to a different transaction.
Then work out how it gets delayed.
I think there may be something else going on. "Essential" work has been allowed to continue, and "essential" had basically been defined as anything directly contributing to economic output.
Meanwhile, the productive desk jobs have moved to the home. This leaves two categories of jobs high and dry, the jobs maintaining the office building, and the bullshit jobs.
The problem is that the existence of bullshit jobs is part of the current deal, and estimates range from 40-50+% of how much work in a western economy is pointless. If the bullshit jobs disappear, it threatens that model and ultimately capital holders. The people may decide to tax capital!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
To quote wikipedia
I wonder how companies are so amazing that feel they can do such evil shit with one face, and then turn with another and tell people they need to pay more taxes...
I mean LOL
[1](https://medium.com/technicity/big-banks-are-at-the-front-cen...)
People working from home save their employers money through reduced need for space, services and consumables at offices or other business premises.
They make lesser demands of public facilities, notably reducing the load on overcrowded transport infrastructure and so improving efficiency, the environment and, particularly at the current time, the health and safety of those who do still need to travel.
They support local businesses in the areas around their homes.
Their own quality of life may be qualitatively improved, not least by getting back several hours every week that is no longer wasted on commuting. This has obvious benefits including greater personal productivity, better mental health and providing more family time for parents and children during the week.
And as a secondary benefit, forcing businesses to accept more remote working might undermine long-standing toxic practices and presenteeism culture imposed by bad management, further improving both business productivity and personal quality of life for many.
We shouldn't be taxing working from home (or working closer to home instead of in distant facilities). If anything, we should be incentivizing this shift in our way of life, and we should be adapting our planning and infrastructure policies to support doing more of it in the future for those who can and want to. That could mean anything from just allowing more small business premises within predominantly residential areas where their services are likely to be needed right up to creating local business hubs where people can set up to work, access shared facilities and enjoy some personal contact if they don't have good facilities to work literally at their own home or they prefer a more social work environment.
We're definitely going to have some big bills to pay after the coronavirus problem has been mitigated, but I can think of a lot of more reasonable ways to generate extra revenue on the required scale than this. How about some real international collaboration to establish transaction taxes on multinationals that make huge amounts of money largely by moving money and/or personal data around with little evidence of any wider societal benefit from their activities, for a start?
There is close to zero chance a bank, the pinnacle of capitalist institutions, supports such an inherently socialist proposal such as wealth redistribution.
Who gets to decide when its pandemic related or not?
Zoom should be making more money since the pandemic, ergo a tax on high income (business related in this case) would cover your example.
Why just tax Zoom — Cisco, Google, and others have meeting products too (I'm stuck on WebEx, eww) so why should they be treated differently?
And if we do that, what does it say that we tax this thing that helps keep the economy from collapsing in the current crisis, punishing it financially, as if we resent it and want less of it?
In terms of concretely for this year (and not being a fiscal expert, just some rando on the web, as I'm sure you're aware) I see governments giving out help to people/companies in need, based on a comparison of current incomes/profits and last year's income in the same month. Not that that's perfect, but if it is workable, I don't see why this couldn't be generalized to the case where companies (or people, but that's probably a fringe) make significantly more profit now than last year around this time. Given the broad economic problems, that should separate out the winners of the crisis quite neatly. Paired with possibility for individual recourse, that should bring in some decent tax revenue and leave room for people who feel their increase in earnings is nothing to do with the pandemic. Of course, those people would have to make the effort to defend that case, and might also stand in the "court" of public opinion as a result.
Apart from that, I don't see why it seems a foregone conclusion that e.g. rent will have to be paid in full. That basically says "we guarantee that whatever happens, people who are well enough off to own more property than they inhabit themselves will not bear the consequences." I don't think as a hard-and-fast rule that's fair either. Because the inversion of that is "whatever happens, we'll have it be paid by those who have the least already."
Mind you, these zombie firms proliferated in Europe after the 2007 crisis, so this is really nothing new. And the good news is that when you do such a thing, you can avoid more disruption. But the bad news is that doesn't leave the economy more resilient when you're done: it leaves it more fragile. In the years ahead, if Europe is further tested by crisis, we may see the real price that her people have paid, and it might very well fall hardest on those who can least afford it.
That would be true, iff the taxes canceled the gains out entirely. Which... I never said. But that always seems to be the expectation when someone proposes to tax wealthy people. Pandemic or not, I never argue for an effective tax rate close to 100%. But I don't have to. I can argue for the effective tax rates being much, much higher than they are currently, and still stay comfortably far away from 100%. So the incentive to gain more would still be there, it just wouldn't be as strong. Not-so-incidentally, I think that would actually be a good thing.
psst
psssssst
it's still punishment if you wipe out slightly less than 100% of the gains; it doesn't just stop
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/16/dark-towers...
Edit: I know that name is a bit unfortunate, but it's a good book and I'm recommending it because of it's coverage of Deutsche, not for the political element - which is actually quite small.
It's a bit like taxing cyclists 10 % of their income because they don't support the car industry...
Good analogy. But their argument is even worse because they don't look at the other benefits of remote work on the economy.
On the other hand they have a huge real estate portfolio (and mortgage portfolio) that I'm sure is now no longer looking like such a smart investment. So they're looking for them and their customers to be the recipients of these grants, no doubt.
> Quite simply, our economic system is not set up to cope with people who can disconnect themselves from face-to-face society.
So it's plausible that there is actually a problem here with the very sudden change of workforce distribution and how it affects society and the economy. But addressing it by simply taxing employers more for work-from-home jobs is definitely short-slighted. But in the short term it seems that something needs to be done to prop up the system because billions of dollars have left the economy overnight and it will likely never return.
God forbid we question our banking system or other broken systems that have been brought into the light of day since COVID started.
> Deutsche Bank says its research is designed to spark debate around a series of important topics.
> Report author Mr Templeman said he'd had a lot of feedback on the report. "A lot of people aren't impressed at the idea of another tax, however, some have seen it as an interesting policy that governments can use to redistribute some of the gains from the pandemic which have been unexpectedly accrued by some people while others have lost out."
So what is this even attempting to accomplish if it wouldn't apply during a pandemic?
>The tax would be paid for by employers and the income generated would be paid to people who can't do their jobs from home.
That's what we want. We want to give people an economic incentive to go out and mix with people in the middle of a pandemic.
I'm working from home right now, but if you told me 5% of my pay would be taxed because of it I'd be back in the office like a shot.
>In the UK, Deutsche Bank calculates the tax would generate a pot of £6.9bn a year, which could pay
...For the massive cost of a huge wave of COVID caused by office workers who have been forced back into central london via public transport.
No, but we do want to incentivize those essential workers who are risking their health and who are often at or barely above minimum wage. Workers at long term care homes, grocery stores, schools, et cetera.
But such a plan is only superficially similar to the crazy Deutsche Bank plan.
Or, hell, tax high-income earners. For instance bank executives working for shady banks
> The tax would be paid for by employers and the income generated would be paid to people who can't do their jobs from home.
But somehow nobody in this thread seems to have read that sentence.
It's not.
It's the fact that a BANK is suggesting that CUSTOMERS take care of THE BANK's problems.
Their piss-poor planning is not my emergency. And if it IS my emergency, you can bet that additional taxes will not be on the table as a fix. Getting rid of the banking system and replacing it with something that works WILL be on the table, though.
As an employer I would have an incentive to request works to show up in the office in order to not pay that tax.
Let’s say for a big company scaling down workspace they can offset the tax. For smaller companies it might actually be more cost effective to keep the office and demand works to come in.
Also why should anyone subsidise someone because their job requires them to be physically somewhere? Also why stop there? Why not tax ppl who have a less stressful job? Or less mentally demanding? Or less physically demanding? And then distribute that tax around.
Honestly, I chose to be a CS because I can work from home. That was the one thing that made me switch from medicine or experimental physics. Why should I be put in a worse situation because of that. And finally I have invested heavily into creating a room in my flat that acts as an office: Multiple monitors, desk, chair, servers, gigabit internet, etc. This contribution to the economy would not have happened if I was not WFH.
> "WFH offers direct financial savings on expenses such as travel, lunch, clothes and cleaning," he said.
> The 5% tax rate "will leave them no worse off than if they had chosen to go into the office".
That seems a pretty clear implication that the money will ultimately come out of their salaries.
But if you're one of those high earners (that let's say works at Deutsche Bank) who sit in an office, you're not gonna write a proposal for higher tax for yourself. So instead you focus on those other people, who are "stealing" your salary by not having to go to the office anymore.
The state taxes where the lion's share of TOTAL wealth is (not wealth per person). That's the income of the middle class. That's why another new tax on income is suggested.
https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/revenue_pie%2C_...
So middle class income represents 80% of the total tax income (and that's ignoring that customs duties and excise taxes also mostly come from that bucket, then we'd easily get to 85%)
"High earners" are generally defined as anyone earning more than double the average income in the country. For the US that's anyone making $62k2 = $120k per household*. Or for an individual that would be a chunk above that $62k, let's say $68k. All figures before tax, of course.
Home work improves many peoples mental state, reduces time spent at work (if you count commutes), people's footprint in terms of pollution and allow for the redistribution of people that were clustered in big cities under asfixiating rent/home owning costs. Why on earth would we disincentivize it?
>By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at restaurants near their places of work, while expensive offices remain virtually empty.
Spending your money isn't an obligation as far as I'm aware. Should I be taxed for bringing my homecooked food to work then? What about walking to my workplace, or using a bike?
>"The virus has benefitted those who can do their jobs virtually, such as bank analysts, and threatened the livelihoods or health of those who can't," added Mr Templeman.
that one is reasonable until:
>It also wouldn't apply when people are asked to stay home for a public health emergency or other medical reasons.
So..the concern is that the virus hurts some workers, but it doesn't apply during times where workers are harmed?
Is there a term for that?
It shouldn’t be taken for granted, of course. And we should aspire to make it easier for good new ideas to take hold.
This is a disingenuous red herring.
It's one thing to claim that some amount of taxes to finance public spending can be benefitial to society.
It's an entirely different thing to claim that taxing remote work brings any benefit to society.
True -- which explains why the following rhetorical question is indeed a RED HERRING.
> Examples of large, modern societies flourishing without the use of taxation?
No one has suggested zero taxation anywhere in the thread that I can find...
I mean, there's already a progressive income tax. Why should society create incentives to commute to work?
I would gladly contribute a larger share of my income as taxes to ensure my community doesn't suffer, provided it was distributed equitably (which is a whole other complicated discussion.)
I would too, which is why I vote with my wallet and buy local, even at a premium, whenever I can.
However, income tax is the exact opposite of helping out the community, as it's designed to fatten up the central government's revenue which is then used up to feed the state's current expenditure.
This is not a true statement.
Deutsche Bank placed number one in money laundering.
I was hoping Douchebank was going to go under. They were a candidate there for a moment at the beginning of April. Talk was they were going to fold. Too Bad.....
How does that ad hominem refute or support the claim that remote workers should be taxed to subsidize vulnerable jobs?
Again, that makes zero sense and is another blatant red herring. If the discussion is about taxing WFH to support vulnerable jobs, it makes absolutely no sense to waste time playing the whole whack-a-mole whataboutism game.
If you don't want to discuss the topic under discussion, please refrain from commenting at all. You'll only end up adding noise to an otherwise interesting discussion.
Don't tell me when or when I shouldn't comment because this proposal is a ridiculous proposal and I'm going to say it so.
By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at restaurants near their places of work, while expensive offices remain virtually empty.
This is a terrible argument that just makes a lot of assumptions without also considering the benefits. The main assumption being that "WFH" is a net drain on the local economy.
While yes, people working from home aren't paying for public transportation, or eating out every day - they are spending money other ways. For example people are using food delivery services, buying more grocery, moving to cheaper COL areas thereby supporting a local economy somewhere else. They are buying better homes or furniture or equipment, etc. We need to understand better the complete impact on the economy to determine the net gain or loss.
> This is a terrible argument that just makes a lot of assumptions without also considering the benefits ...
You forget who is the beneficiary of people using those expensive offices. Could it be Deutsche Bank has a huge investment into commercial real estate and is looking to be the recipient of these "grants" ?
Fuck everything about this.
Alan Sugar (British Trump equivalent) similarly issued a demand for people to "get their asses back in the office" after telling everybody his commercial real estate portfolio wasn't performing: https://www.standard.co.uk/business/lord-sugar-offices-prope...
https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/03/lord-alan-sugar-calls-on-gove...
Good riddance to them.