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At Christmas, that's a tradition, when the family squats together. The children never call, but they do come on Christmas Eve, because later they want to meet the old friends. The family dinner has to stop before, even if the uncle swings the big word again, everyone has to go through, after all he's rich, the old uncle, and every now and then he lets something jump. So don't contradict. When he's gone, the others can still do what they want.
If Germany were a family, her rich uncle would be called Hasso Plattner.
It is difficult to convey to relatives what exactly Uncle Hasso makes his money with. Nobody understands how he relies on the architecture of relational database management systems. But what you do know is that he has become incredibly successful and rich, the company SAP he co-founded is the most valuable company in the country. In time for Christmas, Plattner once again raised his thundering voice, because the Germans are threatening to become unreasonable.
Just read in teletext
Actually, two editors of the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" only wanted to ask him about the state of digitization in Germany, but Plattner swept the subject away. He has other issues on his mind: "I just read in the teletext: 72 percent of Germans are in favor of wealth tax. With a 2 percent wealth tax, I have to leave Germany."
Please do not roll your eyes now, the teletext actually still exists and you do not roll your eyes when Hasso Plattner speaks. Nobody can want him to leave Germany. He renovates facades and copper roofs in Potsdam, he donates institutes and museums, he collects art and likes to sail, he is a doer and patron. We need more of it, not less.
And what is this old idea of a wealth tax supposed to do? Let us remember: Although it is expressly provided for in the constitution, the property tax law passed by the Bundestag in 1952 still exists. In 1995, however, the tax was declared by the Constitutional Court to be incompatible with the Basic Law, among other things because it valued real estate assets differently from other forms of property in its former form. However, instead of doing the obvious and changing the valuation of the property, the Kohl government suspended the tax. And no government afterwards repaired the law. It has been unused in the garage since then.
more on the subject
Uncle Hasso's favorite topic
Since then there have been repeated attempts to get wealth tax back on the road, but it never happened, although the distribution of wealth in Germany is drifting further and further apart. The aid organization Oxfam, for example, calculated in January 2019 that the wealth of the wealthiest Germans had increased by 20 percent within a year, but that the poverty rate had risen to its highest level since 1995. The German super-rich own up to a third of the total wealth in the country.
The SPD recently decided a new initiative to reintroduce wealth tax: anyone who owns two million euros should give up one percent according to their plans, up to 20 million the rate should increase linearly to 1.5 percent, from 100 million to 1.75 percent, and it should only be two percent from a billion.
In the column Agitation and Propaganda, Stefan Kuzmany writes about current developments in politics and society. Subscribe to the newsletter directly and free of charge here:
The multi-billionaire Hasso Plattner cannot remain silent - as is practically always the case when someone publicly uses the word "wealth tax". "This is my favorite topic," he said back in 2013. Like the same Christmas dinner, he tries the same argument every year: shareholders have to sell shares in order to pay the tax - and that is especially bad for founders who are in control would lose about their own business.
"What would that have meant for SAP after the IPO in 1988?" Asked the "Bild" newspaper in early 2018. Plattner: "Then SAP would never have grown that way." However, as is known, there was still wealth tax.
In 1988 SAP had a turnover of 91.6 million euros. The last time wealth tax was raised in 1996 was $ 1.9 billion. You'd think that growth was decent, despite the bad tax. In the years without wealth tax afterwards, SAP never again achieved such growth rates in sales.
In 2012, Plattner calculated in SPIEGEL how much a one percent tax would cost him: "At the moment, SAP is valued at around 28 billion euros on the stock exchange. Since my share of about twelve percent would be worth 3.4 billion, I would like to 34 million euros in property tax annually. " In the current "FAS" interview, he no longer feels like answering the corresponding question: "I don't have to tell you the exact amount."
The SAP stock exchange price has roughly doubled since 2012. One cannot imagine what that could mean for the potential wealth tax burden of Plattner. Hopefully at least someone will buy him a Christmas goose.
