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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> > 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" ?
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.
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...
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I cringe every time I see a plan of the form "tax x to help y", with some supposed relation between x and y as justification. Is x something we want to discourage? Does y need help the most? These questions are completely unrelated. If x is something we want to discourage, we should tax it, then think about how to best spend the money. If y needs help the most we should help, then think about whether to spend less on other things, raise taxes or go further into debt.
I agree with this mostly but what about the following:
Tax a very small % for automation at grocery stores. Low enough tax so that it is still profitable to automate checkout but also so that you don’t get a huge dump of unemployed ppl on the street.
My first gut reaction is/was: “Wait what no I lost my job in march due to political shenanigans in civil/public agency, got out with server bouts of panic attack, 60 pounds heavier and lifeless, I managed to get re-hired in a fucking pandemic and you want to tax me more because you wasted some of the money you already took from me in policies that didn't replenish masks and respirators stock and I hear stock markets are skyrocketing and Bezos&co are richer than before the crisis and you want to tax the people who are keeping their head out of the water instead of going for once after the so-symbolic GAFA and others and the Deutsche Bank's plan is tax me more instead of helping fight global financial fraud ?! The Deutsche Bank ? On a BBC website, from a country that first denied covid then went the herd immunity foolish path ? Give them more money to build such plans ? To the people who brought us Brexit ?!" /s
I need to calm down a bit before reading the article :D but at least you have the gut/first reaction of a random joe to reading such headlines.
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.
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?
A free market solution would be to make commute time paid (maybe to some reasonable maximum e.g. 1h per direction).
So instead of companies forcing their employees to come to the office so they don't get slapped with a penalty tax, they'd be actively participating in optimizing commutes. And it would similarly support those workers who have no option.
Certainly for an at-will contract they could have some influence, as they could always fire anyone who lives farther than, say, 10 minutes away. Then their challenge would be to find enough workforce within that 10 minute radius. For a low paid on-site job located in an expensive city center, that could be hard.
I'm sure there would be all sorts of loopholes and weird situations in paid commutes. But there are also many of them in the remote tax suggested by the article. For instance, what would happen if a company officially says "no, you have to come to the office" but then in practice does nothing to enforce the rule?
Also, as a curiosity, where I live, there's a tax deduction for commute costs. Obviously, it's fine-tuned so that most people don't get to use it (i.e. would be so small that the effort to claim it exceeds the benefit), and so that you can never recover all your practical expenses. But some of those who have become remote workers because of COVID have lost access to that deduction.
Even without at-will employment, employers have ways to put pressure on their employees. "Prioritizing" them in layoffs, withholding promotions and training, etc.
One could argue that since these services are no longer needed or as heavily utilized due to people being able to work from home, then the service as is isn't feasible anymore and will need to change, rather than taxing those who are no longer interested in partaking in this service.
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."
Of course if we removed the "but what about the jobs, can I have a bailout" option then firms would have to get back to competing for business rather than bailouts.
We need an alternative job that people always have the option to take. No need to tax anybody to create that
Taxes have many purposes, and one of them is incentivizing preferred behaviors. Why should we discourage working from home? Is wasting a significant part of your life commuting to work really that good for the society? It's certainly not for the environment.
Also, there are many hidden drawbacks of working from home – it's more socially isolating, the work-life balance suffers, setting up a home office may be costly. I can imagine such a tax making working from home not worth it for lots of people.
Working from an office is certainly good for keeping the price of commercial real estate high. And if you’re a bank who loans money to people who buy/build commercial real estate with that money, and then the value of the commercial real estate falls... well you’d be in for a giant world of pain.
If people can’t repay their loans you’re now stuck with something worth a lot less than all that money you gave out. OOPS.
I’ve been wondering what banks are going to do about this one. It’s a long term trend happening much faster than anyone could predict.
This is absurd. Not having to take public transport and not eating in restaurants is considered a 'unfair financial benefit'?
People that don't use those facilities have to pay for those that have?
How is this different from people that work in expensive and cheap neighborhood? Why don't we all contribute to the expensive lives of people in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and New York because it's unfair that the rest of the world lives so cheap?
> 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.
If there's a large-scale shift to working from home, I'd imagine you'd see an eventual rebalancing of cities & suburbans in both directions:
— more cafés and restaurants in suburban commuter towns or residential areas that were previously ghost towns during the day. (Personally, if there were more cafés and restaurants around my home (and we weren't in the middle of a lockdown) I'd be happy to frequent those while WFH to get out of the house & as a change of scene.)
— if offices do end up vacant longer-term, a conversion of some of this 'down town' space to residential.
In the interim, you'd probably want to support people and businesses along the way, but I don't think introducing taxes to chivvy people back to the existing (old?) status quo is the way forward out of all this. This could be an opportunity to make city centres a lot more livable.
On the issue of public transport — at least here in London, the network was struggling for funding even before the pandemic nevermind now. I think it's time to bite the bullet and make public transport free at the point of use — I'd happily pay an extra tax for that and would go some way to reducing day-to-day expenditure of people who depend on it most. Plus (again, when we're back to normal), it may encourage more people to reduce single-passenger car use if they're already paying for the train/bus.
How is that supposed to be fair? Working from home, I now have to pay for the energy consumed by my work computer out of my own pocket, I have to have a desk which consumes precious space in my expensive apartment and nobody is compensating me for any of that. And now this shady institution wants me to pay an extra tax on top of that?
The macroeconomics of this make sense, but the behavioral impacts of this could be damaging. For that reason, I'd rather see this framed as a tax credit for essential workers. It ends up being similar, but framed as a positive reinforcement instead of a negative punishment.
Another thought, why not tax internet traffic instead? In a world where internet is driven by natural resources, be they spectrum, cables, or other, it makes sense to internalize the costs of those resources to the system.
That ground is 3D and plentiful (for cables) almost everywhere. When access to it is hard, it's usually because somebody is artificially restricting it. The solution is to stop restricting it, not to tax it.
So, if I choose to work in the office because I prefer and not because I don't have a choice I still benefit from someone who has no choice but work remotely?
Who pays for bills incurred due to working from home?
I can sort see this being a temporary tax on exceptional circumstances (such as public health crisis that halts work for those non-remote) but the proposal explicitly excludes this.
As a permanent tax this only sounds like a tax to make employees (since self-employed won't be taxed) pay for a hypothetical change in paradigm of how people work. Society has been investing in a model (expensive centralized infrastructure for on-site work) that is become obsolete and to sustain this obsolete model they propose to make employees pay for the transition.
We actually produce hardware locally and employees in production cannot just stay at home. Same is true for a lot of other industries, so it is unfair to a degree.
That said, Germany isn't exactly a tax haven and I wouldn't agree to a tax increase if it isn't for directly supporting business currently affected by the pandemic (it will be a very large invoice...)
Businesses not affected by the pandemic:
Deutsche Bank
Get the financial transaction tax and it would end a lot of useless transactions immediately and would maybe end some parasitic industries. It is also unlikely to hit people in precarious positions.
People who can work and kept their jobs already pay more taxes than people who couldn't and lost their jobs. I'm not against supporting people who find themselves in dire straits. But that is already happening.
> "For years we have needed a tax on remote workers," wrote Deutsche Bank strategist Luke Templeman. "Covid has just made it obvious."
The chutzpah of these turds is unbelievable.
"For years we have need a tax on TBTF banks, their traders, their bosses, their board members, their speculators, and the taxes and bonds raised them to bail them of their losses, their bankruptcies, and their assholery." "Covid has just made it obvious".
Why don't we start on a 45% tax on the salaries of Deutsche Bank employees who can work from home but refuse to.
I think it's just because this is the rare case where pretty much everyone agrees with how stupid the proposal is (thanks again, Europe's regulatory culture!)
When there's a significant balance of good-faith disagreement, mocking turns the temperature up substantially and people tend to avoid it more.
Because their business model is so intimately tied to state power, they're not really just a business, like others. They're able to create fractional money on which they charge interest, customer deposits are state-insured, even they are almost always first in line for bailouts and other special treatment in challenging times.
They can also quite clearly afford to pay more.
The only way this could make sense if business increased wages by 5% for remote workers, so they don't have to rent such large offices etc and still get all this manpower.
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.
Such tax has a distribution effects similar to universal income but with tons of distortions. This tax will have effect on people's decisions to work from home. Why not just pay for it with higher progressive income tax.
Should we put an extra tax "at source" for
- online shopping to support high street retailers ?
- electric car manufacturers to support the oil industry?
- all renewable energy companies to support coal mines?
> Should we put an extra tax "at source" for - online shopping to support high street retailers ?
Some countries are losing revenue, especially where products are bought from overseas and are not subject to some kind of value tax such as VAT, Sales Tax, GST. So yes some countries are looking into how they can tax online shopping. Which this is not to support the retail industry, it is to prop up the Government's funds.
> electric car manufacturers to support the oil industry?
Some countries are looking at taxing electric vehicles differently because they lose the excise taxes attached to fuel consumption. Which this is not to support the oil industry, it is to prop up the Government's funds.
> all renewable energy companies to support coal mines?
This will come, it is expensive to build and maintain power infrastructure. This will be especially more susceptible when power infrastructure is nationalized in a country.
The first example here was interesting as it displays a loss in tax revenue, the second is a loss in revenue to cover the cost of existing services, and the third an example of the same.
If the government builds infrastructure for a train for example, the cost does not stop because people stop using it. There maybe loans which need to be paid, maintenance which needs to be ongoing, jobs which need to be paid for etc. While over the long term this may dwindle down, the short term is that these costs need to be covered. Just like if you lost your job, you would be looking for a new job to cover your expenses, they just don't go away, the government does the same thing by relocating or reallocating taxes or revenue generation to another sector.
While I don't agree with the concept put forward, the general principles make sense.
on the first 2 it's like you say. The third one was meant to underline taxing a new industry to support one on it's way out. Maybe I didn't pick the best example out there.
I do agree with taxation to a certain extent(within reason). Like you say: infrastructure is expensive to build and maintain. That being said I am not a fan of paying for major inefficiencies or/and taxes meant to discourage/favour one industry as opposed to another(including long term subsidies).
I personally find it absurd how much is really paid as % in taxes from the yearly pay of a normal employee(taxes paid by employee, employer, included in product pricing, etc). This would be one of the reasons I don't like taxation at source(would render offshores almost obsolete).
Distribution effects similar to universal income but with tons of distortions. This tax will have effect on people's decisions to work from home. Why not just pay for it with higher progressive income tax.
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.
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.
Yeah, the analyst's conclusion seems to be very dumb/unworkable...
What if monthly public transport tickets (if we're talking about places with public transport) and lunch subsidies are added to employees' benefit packages, but if you work from home these will be reduced at a pro-rata basis (WFH 40%? You only get 60% of that money)...
This reminds me of Shell (the oil giant, who had allegedly known for decades that they are pushing towards an environmental catastrophe but hid it actively for $$$) tweeting
> What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions? #EnergyDebate
I'm going to sound like a total commie, which I'm not, but when are people going to get fed up with companies/persons earning billions telling us that WE need to be paid less so that THEY don't loose money or are paid more.
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?