Crush Liberalism

Danes’ oppressive tax rates chase off labor

Who knew that people wouldn’t want to stick around and be taxed at 63% of their income?  From IHT:

As a self-employed software engineer, Thomas Sorensen broadcasts his qualifications to potential employers across Europe and the Middle East. But to the ones in his native Denmark, he is simply unavailable.

Settled in Frankfurt, where he handles computer security for a major Swiss corporation, Sorensen, 34, has no plans to return to the days of paying sky-high Danish taxes. Still, an unknowing headhunter does occasionally pass his name to Danish companies.

“When I get an e-mail from them, I either respond negatively but politely,” Sorensen said. “Or I don’t respond at all.”

Born and trained at Denmark’s expense, but working – and paying lower taxes – elsewhere in Europe, Sorensen is the stuff of nightmares for Danish companies and politicians searching for solutions to an increasingly desperate labor shortage.
…
Young Danes, often schooled abroad and inevitably fluent in English, are primed to quit Denmark for greener pastures. One reason is the income tax rate, which can reach 63 percent.
…
But success has given rise to an anxious search for talent among Danish companies, and focused attention on émigrés like Sorensen. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is based in Paris, projects that Denmark’s growth rate will fall to an annual rate of slightly more than 1 percent for the five years beginning in 2009, reflecting a dwindling supply of a vital input for any economy: labor.

The problem, employers and economists believe, has a lot to do with the 63 percent marginal tax rate paid by top earners in Denmark – a level that hits anyone making more than 360,000 Danish kroner, or about $70,000. That same tax rate underpins such effective income redistribution that Denmark is the most nearly equal society in the world, in that wealth is more evenly spread than anywhere else.
…
But the high taxes, mixed with his wife’s discomfort in Denmark, meant that a job offer in Qatar three years ago was all it took to pry him away from Copenhagen. Now, he is ensconced in Frankfurt, setting up a new business on the side and planning to pay no more than 25 percent of his income to the German state.

“When you are at 63 percent tax, you don’t look forward to the evaluation with the boss to get a raise,” Sorensen said. “You look for more vacation or a training course in the tropics – something that you get the full benefit of.”
…
Danish business normally keeps its distance from politics, but in parliamentary elections this year, a few companies jumped into the fray.

Lars Christensen is co-chief executive of Saxo Bank, a Copenhagen financial services firm specializing in currency trading and retail brokerage services. New employees at Saxo Bank get a copy of “Winning,” the playbook of Jack Welch, the brass-knuckled former chief executive of General Electric, and “Atlas Shrugged,” the libertarian manifesto by Ayn Rand, suggesting that the boss has little time for solutions that beat around the bush.

“The high tax rate is the No. 1 problem we have,” Christensen said. “It’s that simple.” …

Mandating “economic equality” by pilfering the fruits of the producers and giving them to the non-producers is to artificially manipulate the market, which always fails! Get it through your heads, Euros: socialism is an abject failure.  How many more of your countrymen must you lose before you get the memo to join the 21st century?

December 6, 2007 Posted by crushliberalism | economic ignorance, Euros, socialism, taxes | 1 Comment