Podcast · Kuuntelija Kuuntelija · 2025-01-12 · 1:42:19 · In Finnish
Inheritance Tax and Building Wealth — Sami Miettinen on Kuuntelija
Published as “Perintövero ja vaurastuminen – Sami Miettinen”
Hosted by: Roni Arvonen
Sami Miettinen joined Kuuntelija host Roni Arvonen for an hour and three quarters on inheritance tax — the first of his two long appearances on the show, and the one people kept clipping afterwards.
The central argument is not about the revenue. Inheritance and gift tax raises roughly €1.3bn, up from €1.17bn in 2023 as the death rate rises, taken out of an inherited pot of something like €7bn spread across some 55,000 estates a year. Sami’s case is that the number is beside the point: what the tax actually does is cut compounding off at the moment it has the most time left to run. Wealth that is allowed to keep growing across a generational handover follows an exponential curve, and a country that interrupts that curve every thirty years never accumulates the private capital that funds anything. Sweden abolished the tax — decided in 2004, in force from 2005 — and Sami reads the Swedish unicorns and the Spotifys as downstream of that. Sweden is an owner economy; Finnish companies are owned instead by state institutions, Solidium, the pension system and foreign capital, because there is almost no domestic private capital left to own them.
The second argument is about what an inheritance actually is. Nobody inherits a sack labelled “one million”. They inherit a flat in a place with no market, held in an undivided estate, with a tax bill due before anything can be sold — and if it will not sell, the bill is due anyway. The same problem shows up in crowdfunded shareholdings: illiquid paper with a high assessed value, landing on heirs who cannot turn it into cash. He extends the logic to wealth taxes generally — if not owning is the virtue, the tailored suit should be rented too.
The conversation ranges wider than the title: YLE, who to vote for and why he stays unaligned, the Martin Paasi episode and how a narrative survives its own facts, the euro and the payments imbalance that has Germany financing over a thousand billion of other countries’ purchases, why Sweden was wise to join the EU without the euro, what Poland gets right, and whether Finland needs its own DOGE.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Introduction, by way of asking Grok who Sami Miettinen is
- 2:51 — YLE
- 5:15 — Owning things is dangerous
- 6:50 — Finland’s most hated tax
- 11:40 — Is inheritance tax an efficient tax?
- 12:20 — Wool-jumper economics
- 16:25 — The Swedish model and what abolition did there
- 21:50 — Do you have to accept an inheritance?
- 31:40 — Who should you vote for?
- 48:10 — Is inheritance tax free money?
- 57:45 — The euro
- 1:09:21 — What can we learn from Poland?
- 1:18:55 — Do income differences widen if the tax goes?
- 1:20:12 — How to reduce an inheritance tax bill
- 1:25:33 — Does Finland need its own DOGE?
The recording lives on Kuuntelija’s own channel and they own it. This page is a record of the appearance and a pointer to the original, not a copy of it. Timestamps follow the chapter marks Kuuntelija published with the episode.
Sami returned to Kuuntelija later for a two-and-a-half-hour conversation on AI, which opens by referring back to this one. Roni Arvonen has also appeared on the Neuvottelija channel, in When a tweet is made a crime.
From the same session: Neuvottelija's own episode
Topics: Ownership, Capital & Tax · Finnish Economy & Policy · Investing & Markets · ← All media visits · Talks & Events · Markdown mirror: index.md