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Comment by aeyes | Hacker News Reader

> you can definitely reach the 100K EUR/year

Before taxes and contributions. If you are single without kids 100k is ~58k net.

It’s harder to compare these numbers than you might think.

The US numbers get seriously fudged via the 12.4% cough 6.2% social security payments etc. Germany pays 7.3% for health insurance which looks bad except we pay 2.9% for Medicare without being able to use it so it’s more like 4.4% for health and dental insurance for 366/Month @100K which doesn’t look so bad.

Of course when people are talking 100k salaries in the US this stuff is baked in so the underlying numbers aren’t necessarily important only achievable take home pay and cost of living.

And, of course, the difference is not just money that goes "to the government", but you get some of it back in form of various benefits, such as free education, a pretty nice high speed highway system (and other roads, of course), comprehensive health insurance (including dental), etc.

I thought it was crazy sauce with the average tax on an equivalent amount of CAD earnings (143,680) being ~26.2% in my province but apparently the Germans are paying 42%..... Canada provides (crappy) healthcare from that tax hit as well so it's more comparable than USA.

If you’re married, 100K are 68K after taxes in Germany (still, not the 26% of Canada, but a very reasonable 32% I would say)

I think Canada's is also way too high for the services provided but my reaction above was just shock at how bad it was rather than a real discussion of tax policy. We really have to compare rates at the margin because that is what is actually pricing incremental services and in Canada that marginal tax rate at that income level is 38% quickly heading up to 48-52ish% depending on which province.

Depends on what you think is fair but I always think about tax from what would I be willing to pay for the service (and pay to provide to others) given what the service is if there was no coercion or free loading and that number is way, way less than what I am currently paying in taxes. This is due to a mix of services being provided that generate no network effect value or negative network effect value to me, poor cost management on the services provided that benefit me and/or benefit me through improving someone else in Canada and in some cases outlawing outside provision to me (i.e. healthcare) and forcing use of the government service that is inferior.

> Germans are paying 42%

With a median income you'll pay quite a bit less, when I was working in Germany I paid about 35%. Income beyond ~65k is taxed at 42%, one of the many reasons why I left - it's really hard to get ahead with such a handbrake considering that a normal house sets you back 500k nowadays.

That's right. It won't make you rich. Just take into account that 100K eur/year is unheard of in other european countries.

Which is extremely comfortable, more than twice the average salary and puts you in the top 10%

That's not the right metric. The right metric is what you would have paid if there was no coercion but also if free loading wasn't an option (aka you would pay up to the marginal benefit to you of the marginal tax. The benefit includes network effects, which gives you the logical framework for why someone would want to pay tax to benefit someone else (they get a positive network effect from helping that person)) It's hard to calculate but it's almost certainly lower than 42 %

The network effect of taxes represents far more than 50% of my salary. Which is a major reason why people in so many countries are so poor.

However, paying out the full benefit I receive isn’t a good baseline because at that point I may as well go somewhere else and keep a larger slice of the pie.

Everyone I know would pay 0% if they could, and they do as much as they can to get close to that. But that's not how you build a country, especially not with the demography we have in the west

That's because everyone is naturally a free loader to some extent, especially under the current regime of blatant misallocation of resources, corruption, etc. If you instead asked them what the value to them of receiving the various direct benefits to themselves was (roads, partially functioning legal system, military protection from invasion, etc) and the value to them of the benefits provided to others (i.e. the fairly well educated workforce to work in their businesses and/or the businesses they are invested in for their retirement plan, management and/or eradication of many diseases they would otherwise be exposed to, etc.) it would be some non zero number and it would increase if the quality of the services increased or if new services that the person needed in of those pathways were added. Governments should endeavor to have taxes that approximate this number. They don't because it leaves no room for vanity projects that have no benefit to the tax payer and large benefit to the politician, no room for corruption and it focuses service provision on services that are of actual value to the tax payer rather than whatever stupid nonsense the politician wants.

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