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Comment by some_guy_there | Hacker News Reader

From what I can find online[1,2], for a dual-income family earning 250k CAD/ 250k USD, tax in BC Canada[1,2] is 33% Federal + 16.80 % State = 49.8%. For California it is 24% Federal + 9.3% State = 33.3%. Is there a big difference in other taxes (like Payroll/Social Security) between California and BC that makes the overall marginal tax same?

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...

[2] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/taxes/income-taxes/person...

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Sales tax is worth considering but doesn’t contribute much to the delta: 12% HST in British Columbia [3] vs. ~8% sales tax in California [4].

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_British_Columbi...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...

Health insurance (USA; upstate New York) costs me $2,300/month in premiums plus $4,000 annually in copays for a family of four. I'd happily take the higher Canadian taxes.

That’s just because you’re in a higher income bracket. If your family of four earned less than ~$50k/year you would pay about 10% that amount for healthcare premiums and have lower deductibles.

The ACA is effectively an extremely large tax on the middle class.

Sure, but most people get it through their employer and have a premium of a few hundred a month (yes, some jobs it's much higher).

And yes, if you get a significant amount of care, the out of pocket can be several thousand.

The health insurance offered by American tech companies tend to be very generous. To the point where health care costs are essentially trivial for most employees/families.

Are you sure? I work for a tech company but not a FAANGM and $2,300 plus a $4,000 out of pocket max is about spot on, maybe even slightly less. I’m often told my providers that I have “great” insurance.

Admittedly, I don't have a large sample size of health plans for tech companies.

Anecdotally, my tech-industry employer (disclosed in my profile) offers only one health plan. Always $0 employee contributions for the employee and dependents and no more than $200/month for the employee's partner.

For in-network: $0 deductible, 0% coinsurance, copays are either $30 or $50 for office visits, $250 copay for ER, and standard $15/$40/$75 tiers for drugs. Out of pocket max is $3k for individual / $7.5k for family.

Given the $0 deductible and 0% coinsurance, it would take a very high number of office visits (at least 60 for individuals or 150 for families) to hit the out of pocket cap. For healthy families, it's fairly difficult to spend more than a few hundred dollars on health care (dental/vision plans are similarly generous).

An interesting example the legal documents provide is pregnancy. The stated cost is $12,800 but the expected out of pocket cost is $60.

depends on the company I guess. at $CURRENT_STARTUP we pay pennies per pay period (literally - I'm not really sure why, but roughly 60 cents) for top tier platinum HMO, zero deductible, $4k max out of pocket for copay. $PREVIOUS_STARTUP was the opposite, bottom tier HDHP and they only paid half the premium, $9k deductible.

Top tax bracket in BC is 53.5%. (The "proposed new tax bracket" is happening.)

Sales tax is 12% (5% federal, 7% provincial) on most products; basic groceries and rent are the most significant exemptions. Federal payroll taxes are 10.2% (pension) + 3.8% (unemployment) on the first ~$55k. BC has a 1.95% payroll tax (nominally earmarked for health care) with a small-business exemption.

Does that include the payroll taxes for the U.S. which are ~15%?

15% is employee plus employer. Employee alone is 8-9% and phases out at $137,000.

Canada has payroll taxes too, so you'd need to add those in as well.

I feel like you should include the employer portion if you're talking about tax %. If we made you're employer pay all of your tax and quote you the post tax amount as your salary our tax rate wouldn't go to 0.

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