Is Germany Preparing To Unveil A Wealth Tax?

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

Will 2027 be the year the wealth register is introduced? Labor Minister Bärbel Bas confirmed this week on Bild that her ministry plans a representative survey of citizens next year on their assets and their views on distributive justice. A classic about-face by this government: just three weeks earlier, Bas had categorically ruled out any such plans.

Concretely, a tax-funded data collection effort involving roughly 5,000 citizens is planned. The rollout will run through an external research institute as part of an EU-wide tender, whose bidding deadline closes September 1.

"Survey experiment on wealth inequality in the population" is the innocuous-sounding name for this study — likely nothing more than a first step toward a comprehensive wealth register.

Cloaked in the mantle of scientific inquiry, politics is edging, step by step, toward the sensitive issue that has hung over the political debate for years like a sword of Damocles: the wealth register. This register — one of numerous European Union projects — is ultimately meant to enable seamless, individualized wealth assessments: the perfect tax base for the perfectly transparent citizen.

What's new here isn't really the format: similar wealth surveys have already been conducted every four years by institutes like Berlin's DIW. What's truly new is the explicit political framing and normative interpretation of the results.

Of course wealth distribution in Germany is unequal — a natural outcome of a free-market order, and an integral part of a system rooted in the principle that reward should follow performance.

The survey design and the interpretation of its results dock directly onto this inequality, and are meant to legitimize policy options such as introducing a wealth tax, raising inheritance taxes, or other redistributive measures. At least Berlin still bothers to maintain a veneer of scientific reasoning before executing its brazen raid on the middle class's savings.

That the German government has done more than merely glance at citizens' wealth became apparent, at the latest, this past Monday. The Federal Statistical Office reported a nationwide deficit of €71.3 billion for the first half of the year — an increase of €36.6 billion over the same period last year. The need is dire. The damage that Berlin's and Brussels' ideological policies have inflicted on the economy in recent years threatens to melt down the tax coffers.

Just a week earlier, the ifo Institute had warned of a fiscal tipping point. Economists concluded that tax revenue could actually shrink going forward, putting an end to Berlin's cornucopia politics. As possible countermeasures, Berlin is now clearly planning tax hikes as well as an expansion of the tax base to include citizens' wealth.

The situation is dire: cyclically sensitive taxes such as corporate and trade tax have shown a negative trend for several quarters now, and the wave of insolvencies sweeping the country, the growing number of business closures, and rising unemployment give no indication that this trend will reverse anytime soon.

From the citizen's perspective, the situation looks like this: given the towering fiscal burdens an ever-expanding state apparatus imposes on him, a sovereign risks becoming a tax vassal — if he hasn't already become one.

A state that cannot get its own budget under control tends toward fiscal highway robbery — and will not hesitate to slap heavy levies on the already multiply-taxed wealth of families and businesses.

You know the drill: it's all done in the name of social justice. Reasons can always be found — but under this kind of policy, what erodes is the remaining sovereignty of civil society itself, the very engine of prosperity, social stability, and republicanism.

Friedrich August von Hayek would likely have judged: Germany is on the road to serfdom — and has already traveled a good stretch of it.

And anyone who still believes the reach for wealth, inheritances, and land will stop at the supposedly rich is in for a rude awakening: the truly wealthy escape the fiscal raid precisely because of their high geographic mobility.

No - the state has its sights set on those who cannot get out of its way: the classic middle class, the Mittelstand, those bound to the land, so to speak - to put it in neo-feudal terms.

The opposite of feudal would be an unrestricted right to private property — one that, naturally, also includes wealth accumulation, entirely without political debate. People are not sovereign when the sword of Damocles of arbitrary taxation hangs over them: once the state can seize assets at will, private property becomes borrowed possession — and the citizen becomes a tax serf. This is precisely why envy-fueled debates over wealth taxes and distributive justice are so dangerous: they shift power from the citizen to the state apparatus, which by its very nature knows no limits — and by now no longer even bothers to hide it.

In the end, only one bitter realization remains: a state that shamelessly lays its citizens bare, and strips away the sanctity of private property along with the last refuges of the once-sovereign citizen using a cheap, resentment-laden argument, has already broken the bond of trust between state and citizen. Wealth as the citizen's last line of defense simply evaporates.

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About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.