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Comment by icode | Hacker News Reader

From the numbers people seem to put in their gross income.

I would find it interestin to see how much is taken away by the goverment for different salaries and locations.

In Germany, the government takes away roughly 50% of your income.

Last line is bs. Its not "the government". Taxes are much less. It includes all kinds of insurances included (medical, unemployment, retirement, etc.)

Normaly I would not answer someone who calls my writing "bs". But since its a public discussion, I want to get the facts straight:

I pay 42% taxes on income.

I pay medical insurance on my own.

I dont have unemployment or retirement insurance.

Are you sure? You need an income of over 300k Euro to reach 42% taxes in Germany. Not saying, that you are not making that much. But sometimes people get confused between marginal and average tax rate.

The highest step is 42%, but overall you pay much less. On the first 8k you pay nothing for instance, then you pay some 20% on the next 20k or so, and so on. The last step is 42% for everything above 200k or so.

It's not that different for some situations in the US. When you add federal, state, county and township personal & business taxes for me (self-employed), it comes out to around 40% of my income... and once I spend any of it, the sales tax is 7% here.

Deleted comment

Where are you getting these? They look like the marginal tax rates, which don't really tell you all that much.

Where do you get those numbers from? If you're taking the top tax bracket, don't, that tells you absolutely nothing about an individual's effective tax rate.

In NYC you will pay about 50% of your gross income if you are just barely qualify for the marginal top tax bracket. Of course these numbers mean squat for your own personal situation:

Federal - ~25% effective, not marginal

State - 8%

Local - 4%

Payroll - 13% on the first 100k or so. 2.5% on the rest.

Sales Tax - 9%

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