No other Scandinavian country has a wealth tax. In the EU, Spain is the only country that officially has a wealth tax. In Spain it only kicks in if your assets are worth more than 3 million Euro (around 35 million NOK). In Norway, you start paying a yearly 1% wealth tax on all your assets, once your net worth reaches 140k Euro.
I am working class. I make basically an average wage here in Norway and I am strongly opposed to the wealth tax in its current form. The retirement age is raised constantly. (It’s been raised to 72 years starting next year for full benefits.) The publicly financed pension scheme is unsustainable, and already inadequate to live a decent life. If you’re lucky, your employer has a good pension scheme. If you don’t, you have to invest money yourself.
It is said that a sustainable withdrawal rate for retirement savings is around 3%. But if you live in Norway, capital gains are taxed at 40%. (The second highest rate in Europe.) Additionally you have to pay a wealth tax equivalent to 1% of all your assets every year. So you basically need to save twice as much as you would in most countries to achieve a sustainable withdrawal rate in retirement. This is not beneficial for the working class. It makes it more difficult to retire, and keeps the working class working.
They could increase the minimum deduction to 40 million NOK or something similar to what Spain does, and people could save for a decent retirement without incurring a wealth tax. Revenue wouldn’t even be affected that much, because most of the revenue from the wealth tax comes from the top anyway. Not to mention that our neighboring Scandinavian countries can deliver very similar public services without any wealth tax at all.
The author claims that Norway is the only Nordic country that isn’t in the EU. This is false. Iceland might be small, but it’s still a country.
In the current economic climate an EU membership seems appealing, but I’m not sure it’s the right choice in the medium-term. Norway has a very different, natural-resource heavy economy than the rest of the EU, and monetary policy would not alway align. I also think it’s important to try to maintain control over fisheries to a larger degree than the EU allows, and I already think the country is making too many concessions in this area.
Like a lot of European countries, Norway is a member of NATO. Even though the US can’t be relied upon anymore, I would still consider it a more credible defensive alliance than the EU. That’s why Finland and Sweden joined last year.
The author says that “…the EU [is] the only organisation for collective European agency in world affairs, and there is safety in numbers.” But the EU does not agree on anything. A third of the European parliament consists of Eurosceptics, and because of internal disagreements between member states, any shared foreign policy ends up completely milquetoast.