Taxing expected return sounds a bit absurd. What if the capital turns out to be lost, does the state give the tax back?
Dude, I have much of my savings for retirement invested in stocks (ETF’s, it’s a fairly safe investment) since the social security in my country kinda sucks. My return on investment is 5% a year. Having a 6% tax actually means I lose money
It’s not 6% tax, the expected returns for investments are 6% and those are taxed at 36%. The first €57k (or €114k with partner) are tax free. So if you have €1M invested and have a partner, they expect you to make €60k and let you pay €20k.
You can invest in a retirement fund (managed by you, if you like) tax free from your gross salary (up to a limit). You’ll pay income taxes over your pay outs when you retire. The conditions are that you can only use it for your retirement.
The NL system which has been working for a while works by saying:
We don’t care about your capital gains, you’d just try to game the system, we’ll pretend you invest everything into a relatively safe bond scheme, and tax your capital income based on that. Meaning we tax wealth as if it was guaranteed income at 4% interest per year. If you gamble and lose, tough break, you still owe the same taxes, as you are bearing the risk on investments, not us.
Most state bonds are quite a bit lower than 4%, and even business bonds (I take bonds in some football clubs as a reference, because they tend to do quite prominent ads on them) only do 5-6%.
