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Comment by freebee34 | Hacker News Reader

Taxes in canada are very high. The ontario income tax rate of 53.53% applies at 220K CAD. the equivalent rate for Cali in USD is 34.75%. you then have PST/GST (14%), way fewer deductions and european gas taxes. The one thing that is a good deal in canada is cheap high quality education. The "free" healthcare that you get is not very good and even the for pay services are of surprisingly low quality.

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The average tax rate for a single person making 250K in Sunnyvale is 32.93% [1]

The average tax rate for a single person making 250K in Ontario is 39.80% [2]

But with the extra taxes you also get some better benefits like healthcare, cheaper education. Of course if your main goal is to save as much money as you can, then it probably better in the US because you earn more salary and USD converts better into other currencies.

[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#I4RNWQ9WYm [2] https://simpletax.ca/calculator

The parent was discussing max tax rate. As a software dev you would presumably be much close to the max rate than the average (at least in the US)

You appear to be misunderstanding the definition of "average" in this context. The first ~50k of your income is taxed at ~20%, the next ~50k is taxed at ~30%, and so on. The average of these percentages gets you to a ~39% average tax rate for 250k income.

Here's a detailed example (grep for "Average tax rate"): https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

Ah you're right, reading comprehension was not high there on my part

Note that this is the _marginal_ tax rate; the average tax rate for 220k CAD is ~38% without deductions.

(Source: https://simpletax.ca/calculator)

We immigrated from the bay area to British Columbia a few years ago. We pay taxes in the US and Canada . Taxes aren't much higher in Canada. And we've used the health care a lot and honestly it's excellent and you don't have to worry about losing it due to job loss.

I love the tax argument.

You're immediately forgetting State taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and such. That 34% quickly becomes 44 to 50% depending on where you live.

> The "free" healthcare that you get is not very good

Utter bullshit. Source: the many friends and family members who have been treated by the system.

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Anecdotes are just that. Anecdotes. The most objective and comprehensive measure of health outcomes, life expectancy at birth, remains significantly higher in Canada than in the United States.

That is very very naive, does not reflect the state of health care system as whole and not even related sometimes. Last I checked, Italy had lower ranking halthcare system than Canada and higher life expectancy. What about hospital wait times? What about wait times for treatments and procedures for non-life threatening illnesses? What about qualify of delivery? What about working hours lost due to all of the above? What about long term consequences of delayed treatments? That is 99% of health care.

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