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Norway, the Country Where No Salaries Are Secret (bbc.com)
In Norway, there are no such secrets. Anyone can find out how much anyone else is paid -- and it rarely causes problems. From a report: In the past, your salary was published in a book. A list of everyone's income, assets and the tax they had paid, could be found on a shelf in the public library. These days, the information is online, just a few keystrokes away. The change happened in 2001, and it had an instant impact. "It became pure entertainment for many," says Tom Staavi, a former economics editor at the national daily, VG. "At one stage you would automatically be told what your Facebook friends had earned, simply by logging on to Facebook. It was getting ridiculous." Transparency is important, Staavi says, partly because Norwegians pay high levels of income tax -- an average of 40.2 percent compared to 33.3 percent in the UK, according to Eurostat, while the EU average is just 30.1 percent. "When you pay that much you have to know that everyone else is doing it, and you have to know that the money goes to something reasonable," he says. "We [need to] have trust and confidence in both the tax system and in the social security system."
News? When the article is about something that happened 16 years ago?
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that kind of transparency generates a social pressure for high earners to justify their income.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
The same information has been available in other European countries since the late 90s or early 00s too. I think it's the case at least in Sweden and in Finland where similar legislation has been in place for at least 15 years now. You can get information on anyone's taxable income.
It has just proved what many have suspected: men make more than women. But what no-one has really bothered to discuss is why. Nowadays it's not about employers paying more to men just because they're men. It's because they have pursued higher paying careers. And before anyone gets into the whole child thing, mind you that the laws in e.g. the Nordic countries are extremely favorable for women (and men!) on having children while staying on their career paths. You can pretty much choose which of the parents stay home and take care of the child -- or you can switch at any point you like. It's just that women still choose to stay home more.
Other than finding out the obvious, this legislation hasn't really brought any real benefits to anyone. Salaries are pretty much the same for everyone in a similar position because of the strong position unions have historically had.
> "We [need to] have trust and confidence in both the tax system and in the social security
> system."
When we're faced with something intolerable but which we cannot change, we find ways to justify our sufferance to ourselves.
Women are paid the same [for the same diploma/experience] as men, danemark has one of the lowest gender wage gap over EU - if not the lowest - around 16%.
Same thing in Finland, everyones total income is public, of course you don't nesseccary know how much you peers salaries are as, they might have additional income from through other work etc. However income from stock and other investments are show separately as they have different tax structure.
This will impose the need for justification if they want to pay women less salaries for the same job.
That may help preventing this worldwide discrimination.
Way to spin Soviet-style spying on your neighbor as a good thing
Certainly, given the avoidance in the UK by Google etc., it would be nice to know exactly what all the corporates are [not]paying compared to their turnover in the territory. I say turnover, because there's less possibility of manipulation and it will give some guide to profitability.
Profit is easy to manipulate, in order to make tax liabilities disappear, yet the offending company still uses the infrastructure in the country. This is a point made by Warren Buffett, that well-known communist, not specifically by me.
That way, we know which companies to boycott. And yes, since you're asking, I have no FB account, don't buy anything from Google ads and am beginning to minimise my use of Amazon. https://www.hive.co.uk/ support local bookshops in the UK, for example.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
talk about pirates,, these clowns are more of the gottiesque variety of pickpockets & hostage takers.. no conscience no heart no spirit no life.. cease fire stand down,, screw the cost... sing along.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCrSXkJY .. nothing really new in centuries..
And we have the same in Sweden. Most people whom make a lot of money have tons of deductibles so they show a low income in the book.
I mean I know we Americans like to pretend to have low taxes, but, in reality, we just have a lot of misdirection and backdoor taxes.
Every fee you pay for a government service, especially the ones they impose on you like driver's licenses which need to be renewed for some reason and the same with car registrations. Then they setup their regulations to maximize offences so they can disproportionately rake in money from the poor. Those fines are all taxes really.
40%? That isn't far off from some estimates I have seen for totals of what a lot of Americans give our worthless government.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
One of the consequences of accepting a lot of third world immigrants will be the destruction of their high trust culture because those immigrants come from cultures where the culture of a high trust society is completely alien to them. There are societies which can still rise to greatness without that high trust culture, but you see them mainly in Asia, not Africa and the Middle East.
Assimilation doesn't ever really happen in a one-directional way. That's why the melting pot, despite being multicultural propaganda, is entirely correct. What does a melting pot do? It makes an alloy. It does not remove impurities. That means that even as makes the foreign stronger by adulteration with the native, it makes the native more foreign by adulteration by the foreign elements.
Within a generation, Norway will either choose to maintain this culture at all costs or will have to abandon these policies. That's assuming that the criminal elements, which are much more prevalent among the "refugees" than the native society, don't realize that this list exists and it provides an accurate breakdown of who to rob and precisely what assets they can give you.
If this is the only tax they pay, and they're not hit with various insurance fees, than this is comparable to North American taxes. If they still pay a state/province tax, social insurance tax(es), possible city tax, health insurance, life insurance, ad&d, ... then yeah, it's high. Any Norwegian readers here to comment?
if you are a federal worker, your salary is not a secret.
Except that in contrast to Norway it is harder to find
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
In Slashdot salaries aren't secret too. I made $50k in Silicon Valley in IT with bonuses. What about you?
with 0 transparency. When will the US catch up? I would love to see this shit here. There would be CEO blood in the streets and it would be glorious.
The rich never want you to learn about or talk about money or finance.
But it would go a long way in calling bullshit on an employer who tells you no on a payraise because " budgets are tight " all the while paying each of their execs a yearly bonus that exceeds your lifetime income.
This sort of transparency would cause a great deal of discomfort for those companies who regularly lie to their employees.
In fact, those companies would find it difficult to keep any employees and, in the end, might have difficulty being a company at all when all of their talent leaves because of it.
The Income Inequality gap in the US is so wide now, this level of transparency would likely cause a great deal of anger at best.
An insane amount of violence at worst.
Tell that to the Washington State legislature.
As the article stated, it used to be that everything was completely open and searchable on the internet for a few years, before that point you had to visit city hall (or the post office) and manually search through huge books.
The current setup is actually very nice, in that the transparency goes both ways:
In order to be allowed to access any tax records you first have to use the same two-factor authentication you would use to deliver your own tax return, and if you then look at any tax return except your own, the person you looked up will be notified that you did so.
I.e. if I think my neighbors are spending too much money and want to check what they have declared, they will immediately be told that I did so.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
It's Fake News. Norway doesn't openly report salaries. You can search for last year's tax, but that's it, and you'll need to register who you are and will be visible to the reported person as a log entry.
tax != salary, though for many normal people, it may have some significance. Not for any 1%ers though.
Came to post this. Left satisfied.
Have gnu, will travel.
Not having worked in getting a college degree. Because while one was in college, working, the other was in a job, working just as hard.
Yet one gets paid more than the other, rewarded more than the other.
PROVING that "work hard and you'll be rewarded" is bullshit.
...and any time pricing information is concealed, it's NOT a free market.
You know the only people who WANT a free market, really want one? Small actors who have no leverage. The BEST deal you can get when you're small is a fair one, as produced by a free market. Every large actor (the company vs you, at salary time, say) wants a closed market, so they can use their size advantage. The Company knows EVERY salary in the company (and they always want to know what you were paid at every previous job, when you apply) while you only know your own, at negotiation time. That's a huge advantage for them, which they always wish to preserve.
Population densities have a lot to do w/ a sense of community. Countries like Japan & Norway have that b'cos there are more people per square mile, and the entire country (aside from the mountains) are populated. In the US, due to things being much more spread out, there is more rugged individualism out there.
It has nothing to do w/ your SJW narrative of how the evil US came about!
There are a lot (or at least more than a few) people who have significant assets but don't flaunt them in any way. Living in the little house on the corner, driving the ten year old car, etc.
Should these people be publicly "outed" so they become targets for everyone from burglars to scam artists to kidnappers? "Lets kidnap Mrs. Smith's grandkid -- she can afford to pay a big ransom!"
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Having that transparency in the US would prevent all kinds of crimes. For example the con man who wants you to make a bad investment could not pretend to be a successful investor. And if we combine that with going to electronic money the bad guys have no way of using their money as your spending needs to be no higher than your income. You just can't make those under the table bribes any more. The truth, the light of day, preventing lies and crimes all sounds like a pretty Christian way to live to me. Those that are serious about the Jewish faith or Islam should embrace this as well. But I will bet they will not. Hypocracy is a powerful demon in itself.
This lacks two properties to be useful, especially in the US.
1. Rich people do not need a "salary", even an "income". They already have "wealth", and "unrealized gains" from their investments. i.e.: they might have a mansion, and own stock in a large company, and receive zero salary but still sustain themselves, their heirs, and maybe three more generations without any additional "salary" (i.e: income tax). In addition to "income", "wealth" needs to be public as well. (But that will attract all kinds of thieves, literal ones, and also "long forgotten family members").
2. The real discrepancy is between companies, and job levels. Knowing another company in another town giving larges salaries will not help, if you do not properly calculate the cost of living, or the skills required to switch jobs. Of course knowing that the CEO has been paid a bonus, while people are taking a paycut is valuable, but even that will not be very useful. People need proper mobility, and access to education to switch jobs, and climb the job levels. Otherwise it will be idle gossip.
Are you, by chance, a stripper?
If not, then I would expect you to have at least a teensy teeny tiny nugget of comprehension of, and appreciation for the concept of PRIVACY.
My business is MY business, and your business is YOUR business, and neither of us has some inherent "right" to snoop about in the other's.
This is just a sliver of the deep philosophical differences between Europeans who lived for centuries under the rule of inbread elites who claimed to own everythig, including the peasants and their info, and Americans who experienced freedem and liberty. As the US slides further left, more Americans are sadly becoming exhibitionists (in both the skin sense, and the personal info sense) like their Euro counterparts but huge numbers of Americans will never surrender to some of this junk.
What about these privacy laws that I keep reading about on /. that are so wonderful in the EU?
in a country that has oil fields? in soviet hellgium if you have a business mowing lawns, you start earning for yourself in august, thats how much taxes ... not counting the quartelies i suppose, you dont have to believe my love for the place, ASK someone who works shyte like that here
so 40% in a rich country doesnt seem that bad from where i stand
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?