Jeroen Dijsselbloem je bil tisti šef evroskupine (2013-2017), ki se je “proslavil” s tem, da je bil glavni rabelj v pogajanjih z Grčijo v času med drugim in tretjim paketom pomoči. Vzvišen, neotesan in neusmiljen (se spomnite, kako je zavrnil stisk roke Yanisa Varoufakisa, tedanjega grškega minsitra za finance?). V nekih drugih časih bi lahko vodil koncentracijsko taborišče.

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Drago Babič

Problem davkov je bolj zapleten, da se bi ga dalo rešiti z nekaj kozmetičnimi popravki. Sodobne ekonomije vse bolj temeljijo na kapitalu in vse manj na živem delu, informatizacija in robotizacija bo ta trend še zaostrila. Posledica je, da kapital ustvarja vedno večji delež dodane vrednosti na račun živega dela. Vzporedno način ustvarjanja dodane vrednosti postaja vedno bolj kompleksen, tako da se izgublja neposredna povezava med živim delom in prihodkom na trgu, zato je potrebno več arbitrarnega razporejanja dodane vrednosti preko davkov. Delo nekega raziskovalca, profesorja, zdravnika pomembno prispeva k ustvarjanju dodane vrednosti, vendar je vse manj neposredno tržno merljivo. Temu bi moral slediti tudi davčni sistemi, ki bi morali zajeti vedno večji delež iz davkov na kapital in razbremenjevati delo.

V to vodijo razmišljanja o UTD ali o uvedbi močnih socialnih skladov. Vendar se v realnem življenju to ne dogaja (razen v Skandinaviji in ponekod v Evropi), ker je vpliv lastnikov kapitala na politiko, ki določa davke, izrazito močan. Najlepši primer je Trump, ki je kot glavno nalogo svojega mandata izvedel davčno razbremenitev korporacij, Obamacare, ki koristi predvsem revnim, pa bi ukinil. Zato že bogati lastniki kapitala vedno bolj bogatijo, revnejši pa ob zmanjševanju realnih dohodkov plačujejo večino davkov. Dokazov za to mi ni treba posebej navajati, jih je bilo na tem blogu objavljenih dovolj.

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V bistvu tehnološki velikani o vas vedo skoraj vse. In kadarkoli lahko te informacije prodajo naprej ali pa sami zlorabijo v vašo škodo.

Once your smart devices can talk to you, who else are they talking to? Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu wanted to find out — so they outfitted Hill’s apartment with 18 different internet-connected devices and built a special router to track how often they contacted their servers and see what they were reporting back. The results were surprising — and more than a little bit creepy. Learn more about what the data from your smart devices reveals about your sleep schedule, TV binges and even your tooth-brushing habits — and how tech companies could use it to target and profile you.

• What the Nordic mixed economy can teach today’s new left – Martin Sandbu
• The Shareholder Revolution Devours Its Children – Mike Konczal
• Why liberal philanthropy is bad for democracy – Nick Tabor
• Are Superstar Firms and Amazon Effects Reshaping the Economy? – Neil Irwin
• Partisanship, Parasites, and Polarization – Paul Krugman
• Trade and growth in the Iron Age – VoxEU
• Socialism in one country – Chris Dillow
• On the Economics of the Google Android Case – ProMarket
• The myth of intertemporal labour supply substitution – Martínez, Siegenthaler & Saez

Nova vlada je, še preden je bila potrjena v parlamentu, poskrbela za precej vznemirjenja. Večinoma se zdijo strahovi, ki se širijo v javnosti, posledica političnega spina proti Levici, v nekaterih primerih pa gre za razumljivo negotovost kot pred vsako novo vlado, ko javnost ne ve, kaj lahko od nje dejansko pričakuje. No, vsaj na področju  napovedi glede davkov je strah podjetij morda bolj upravičen. Ob napovedi bolj ugodne davčne obravnave tehnoloških podjetij koalicija napoveduje, da bo spodnjo mejo davka na dobiček iz dejavnosti (DDPO) določila na 5% in hkrati osebne prihodke iz kapitala in rent vključila v osnovo za odmero dohodnine.

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Aljaški trajni sklad

The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) only exists today because Alaska Governor Jay Hammond was obsessed with the idea of dividend-paying social wealth funds.⁴³

Before his stint as governor, during the 1960s, Hammond was the manager of a 2,000-person municipality in Alaska called Bristol Bay Borough. Bristol Bay was teeming with salmon resources, but 97 percent of those resources were being extracted by Seattle-based firms, not local fishermen. The Seattle-based firms even preferred hiring non-residents to staff their fishing operations, meaning that the local population was largely locked out of the job opportunities the salmon catch provided.

This situation resulted in serious economic deprivation for Bristol Bay residents: “no high schools, sewer or water systems, health care facilities, fire, police, or ambulance services.” The town’s garbage “was dumped over the riverbank in hopes it would flush out with the ice during high spring tides.”

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Norveški triumf

Norway’s central government currently manages three main asset pools. There is the Government Pension Fund Norway (GPF-Norway), a stock and bond portfolio that is invested in Norwegian and other Nordic companies;²⁵ the Government Pension Fund Global (GPF-Global), a stock, bond, and real estate portfolio invested exclusively outside of Norway;²⁶ and the state-owned enterprises (SOEs), a set of 74 domestic companies that are directly owned by 12 government ministries.²⁷

GPF-Norway and GPF-Global are social wealth funds. The SOE assets, because they are owned directly by ministries rather than through a fund, are not technically a social wealth fund. But the SOEs are nonetheless in the spirit of a SWF and could be rolled into a SWF if the Norwegian state wanted to do so.

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Zakaj je propadel švedski poskus?

The most famous social wealth fund in history was the one briefly established in Sweden in the 1980s.²⁰ The Swedish “Wage-Earner Funds,” as they were called, were the brainchild of trade union economists Rudolf Meidner and Gösta Rehn. Meidner published a book on the idea in 1978 titled Employee Investment Funds: An Approach to Collective Capital Formation and then a retrospective paper in 1993 titled “Why Did the Swedish Model Fail?”²¹

The Meidner plan, as it came to be known, proposed using a scrip tax to gradually transfer ownership of Sweden’s corporations away from private shareholders and into wage-earner funds administered by the country’s labor unions. Under the plan, Swedish companies would be required to essentially pay a 20 percent tax on their profits. But rather than paying that tax in cash, they would instead issue an equivalent amount of new company stock to the relevant Wage-earner fund.

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O tem bom več pisal v prihodnje, ko bom pripravil predlog za Slovenijo. Za ogrevanje podajam nekaj background podatkov. Matt Bruenig je pred dnevi na podlagi izkušenj drugih držav objavil predlog Družbenega premoženjskega sklada (Social Wealth Fund) za ZDA. Nekateri to imenujejo “neoliberalni socializem“.  Socializem zato, ker temelji na državnem upravljanju skupnega, družbenega premoženja v skladu, pri čemer bi iz donosov od premoženja v tem skladu vsem državljanom izplačevali letne dividende – pod imenom univerzalna temeljna dividenda.  Neoliberalni pa zato, ker bi v ta namen uporabili mehanizme kapitalizma, torej donose od naložb v različne vrste premoženja, ki po možnosti kotira na borzi.

Mnogim se bo ta ideja zdela zmešana. Toda na njihovo presenečenje bodo ugotovili, da so tovrstne ideje že zelo stare in uveljavljene ter da v praksi v nekaterih – kapitalističnih (!) – državah odlično funkcionirajo. Ker so ljudje leni in neradi gredo na povezavo prebrat originalne članke, dolgih pa sploh ne, bom v nekaj nadaljevanjih objavil ključne poudarke iz Bruenigovega članka. Nato pa se lotimo predloga za Slovenijo.

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Ideja Matta Brueniga o načinu financiranja univerzalnega temeljnega dohodka sploh ni slaba. Nasprotno. Pa še izvedljiva je.