They had essentially a wealth tax in Box 3 - your investments/savings are deemed to have a fixed fictional yield on which you pay income tax. Currently, 6.17% yield x 32% tax = 2% wealth tax. Hurts just a little bit, but it's a smooth, predictable cash flow.
They are replacing it with a much worse and untested economic policy - taxing unrealized capital gains every year. Not a big deal for relatively stable assets (real estate etc), but can explode in your face if you're into any risky volatile stuff (stocks, options, crypto) - they can crash next year, but your tax bill won't. Lack of liquidity can get you as well - you may have huge gains on paper, but for various reasons unable to sell in a reasonable timeframe and come up with equally huge amount of cash for the tax office - we're talking probably 30-50% tax here vs 2% under the old system. Double taxation if you have US passport - you're going to have to please both tax systems or pay double the tax.
The outcome I'd guess would be an exodus of the rich / upper middle class, and then they either scrap it or tighten further with exit taxes. Oh and they're also scrapping the coveted "30% ruling" for expats. Probably can forget about ever being able to FIRE in Netherlands.
It is essentially a wealth tax system. But I wouldn't call it low: currently, 6.17% fictional yield x 32% tax rate = 2% wealth tax rate - it is at the high end among countries with a wealth tax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax)
Looks like they're coining a new legal term "Capital Growth Tax", under which they are going to tax unrealized capital gains. I'm not aware of any other country that taxes them like that (besides wealth/exit taxes), so maybe they're the world's first here!
Some countries have wealth taxes - but they are usually flat or scale with wealth, not the yearly increase in wealth. Note that currently NL does de facto have a wealth tax in Box 3 system - shares are presumed to have a fictional fixed yield of around 5-6% per year on which they charge you income tax, so it works out to about 2% wealth tax.
For real estate, yes, but it's a quite different type of asset with a stable value that (mostly) only goes up.
What about stocks or crypto (the assets this new law targets)? They can have wild value fluctuations in a year. If your crypto or startup's options have +1M paper gain this year and turn worthless the next year, is it fair to ask people to cough up some 300-500k of real cash in tax?
Maybe? You can deduct losses.
If you have to sell a little of your crypto while the price is high to pay your taxes, then what have you lost after it goes to zero? At least the tax office get something out of it in tat case.
Not really, property taxes in the U.S. are revenue-driven (sometimes called “budget-driven”), not rate-driven. The taxing authority adds up how much money it needs, then apportions it based on property values.
It's impressively compliant, considering it's just a one man project! Almost as fully featured as Boa, plus or minus a few things. And generally faster too, almost double the speed of Boa on some benchmarks.
First time seeing a few of the engines listed here - based on this table I'm surprised Samsung's Escargot hasn't gotten more attention. LGPL, 100% ES2016+ compliance, top 10 perf ranking, 25% the size of V8 & only 318 Github stars.
A quick HN search shows 0 comments for Escargot - is there some hidden problem with this engine not covered in this table?
Because it pretty much only makes sense for Samsung TVs and smart appliances since it scores 3% on the benchmarks vs V8.
It's too big for most embedded devices, too slow for general computing, and if you can run something 25% the size of V8, you can probably just run V8. If for some reason that size and speed profile does fit your niche and you aren't Samsung wanting to use their own software, then Facebook's Hermes looks better in terms of licensing, speed and binary size and writing compatible JS for it isn't that hard.
Personally, I'm more impressed with https://github.com/Hans-Halverson/brimstone - it is faster, nearly just as full featured (almost full ES2025) and last but not least, a single person project.
Yeah! I found out about Brimstone just the other day! Its definitely interesting! One optimization that they have that Boa needs to implement is ropes for our string type :)
A solver running at 50ms instead of 1ms I would say is practically imperceptible to most users, but I don't know what time span you are measuring with those numbers.
$ time ./v8 /bench/yt-dlp.js | md5sum -
a730e32029941bf1f60f9587a6d9554f -
real 0m0.252s
user 0m0.386s
sys 0m0.074s
$ time ./quickjs /bench/yt-dlp.js | md5sum -
a730e32029941bf1f60f9587a6d9554f -
real 0m2.280s
user 0m2.507s
sys 0m0.031s
So about 10x slower for the current flavor of YouTube challenges: 0.2s -> 2.2s.
A few more results on same input:
spidermonkey 0.334s
v8_jitless 1.096s => about the limit for JIT-less interpreters like quickjs
graaljs 2.396s
escargot 3.344s
libjs 4.501s
brimstone 6.328s
modernc-quickjs 12.767s (pure Go port of quickjs)
fastschema-qjs 1m22.801s (Wasm port of quickjs)
boa 1m28.070s
quickjs-ng 2m49.202s
node(v8) : 1.25s user 0.12s system 154% cpu 0.892 total
quickjs : 6.54s user 0.11s system 99% cpu 6.671 total
quickjs-ng: 545.55s user 202.67s system 99% cpu 12:32.28 total
A 5x slowdown for an interpreted C JS engine is pretty good I think, compared to all the time, code and effort put into v8 over the years!
It works incredibly well with Linux VMs, my daily driver. I plug in a USB keyboard, external monitor and Can't Believe It's Not Linux. Only occasionally when I need to use the laptop screen/keyboard does macOS bother me and remind of it real self.
There's around 10-15% performance penalty for VMs (assuming you use arm64 guests), but the whole system is just so much faster and well built than anything Intel-based to day, that it more than compensates.
For Windows, it's lacking accelerated video drivers, but VMWare Fusion is an ok free alternative - I can totally play AAA games from last decade. Enjoy it until broadcom kills it.
Funny you say that, as a long term Linux user who was in the exact same boat as you, I actually find Mac M4 my best Linux laptop purchase ever so far. I think what you're missing is its virtualization story. Put UTM on it, and you're back to a familiar environment, just on much nicer hardware. The first time I booted into my Linux desktop on it, I was blown away by how much snappier it felt compared to my ~5 year old top-of-the-line PC build.
I'm as much of a fan of Mac OS as the next Linux user here, but it's a very decent hypervisor and Stuff Just Works out of the box, for the most time. No more screwing around with half-baked qemu wrappers for me, vfio, virgl and what not. And running stuff without virtualization is a non-starter for me, I've been concerned about supply chain attacks before it became fashionable. Of course it would be even nicer if new Macs could run Linux natively, and I hope Asahi project will succeed with that, but until then I'm pretty happy running Linux desktop virtualized on it.
arm64 support is very decent across all the different OS now, I hardly miss Intel. I can even reasonably play most AAA games up to maybe mid-2010s on a Windows VM that's just a three finger swipe away from my main Linux desktop.
They are replacing it with a much worse and untested economic policy - taxing unrealized capital gains every year. Not a big deal for relatively stable assets (real estate etc), but can explode in your face if you're into any risky volatile stuff (stocks, options, crypto) - they can crash next year, but your tax bill won't. Lack of liquidity can get you as well - you may have huge gains on paper, but for various reasons unable to sell in a reasonable timeframe and come up with equally huge amount of cash for the tax office - we're talking probably 30-50% tax here vs 2% under the old system. Double taxation if you have US passport - you're going to have to please both tax systems or pay double the tax.
The outcome I'd guess would be an exodus of the rich / upper middle class, and then they either scrap it or tighten further with exit taxes. Oh and they're also scrapping the coveted "30% ruling" for expats. Probably can forget about ever being able to FIRE in Netherlands.
reply