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Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Most of my peers (in the socialist republic of EU) work 4x week to minimise the money that gets wasted in taxes. Often times when people progress they just ask to keep the same salary and work less so there is less taxable income for the taxman to steal (and rates are not progressive: if you earn even a penny over a certain amount you pay significantly more taxes on your whole income).

We are all contractors to minimise taxation so the company gets to pay 4/5 days and gets most of the productivity anyway.

For managers it's a no brainer, for employees, I don't think the extra day of freedom is worth the loss in pay.

I guess in a stricter company we would be punished for not being as productive on friday.

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What? What country does that? Most have a progressive tax system, so when you earn more and move into a higher tax bracket, only the amount of income that falls into that bracket is taxed at the higher rate, not your entire income.

Which EU country has a non-progressive tax rate?

Hungary

Poland offers flat tax rates: 12% for IT entrepreneur or 19% for employees.

That's not quite right, if you have a single person company (with unlimited personal liability) you can choose between revenue and income tax. Both are flat rates, revenue is 12% for certain groups of companies, including software engineering with revenues below several million euro, income tax is 19% universally.

I do not understand. How are you losing money by being paid more?

They’re saying that the tax rate is not like the US where you pay x% on the first $y dollars and so on… but rather you pay x% on your entire income for the year. So if at $100k the tax goes from 15% to 20%, and I get a raise from $99k to $100k, I actually net less after the increased taxes than if I just stayed at $99k.

It does not work that way at all - nowhere in Europe.

You have ranges, say from 0 to 100 you pay 10%, then for the amount above 100 up to 200, you pay 20%, then for the amount above 200 to 300 you pay 30% and so on (the numbers are all made up).

So when you get a raise from 100 to 150, you pay 10% on 100 (10) and 20% on 50 (10), so a total of 20. You get a net 150-20 = 130.

If it was the way it was described it would be insane.

There are also cases where the tax is flat and the same no matter the amount (usually not for salaried people)

That doesn’t surprise me, I was just translating what the other guy was saying!

Yes thanks - I was not sure I got OP's comment right.

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