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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Tax-wise, the US is among the worst places to be self-employed. Per this little calculation of mine, an IT entrepreneur earning $100k would keep >99% in Singapore, but <57% in SF. (Massive caveats apply and are enumerated in detail in the article.)

http://gyrovague.com/2013/10/30/half-the-donut-why-an-entrep...

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I was going to rebut the linked article, but it has so many basic factual errors that it's easier to say that the article is completely useless. Suffice to say, when you cherry pick the financial considerations included in your "model", it's easy to reach whatever conclusion you want.

As the author of said article, I'd be keen to hear about these "factual errors". Yes, the calculation makes a lot of assumptions, many of them generous, but these are clearly laid out upfront. And while I agree that you would probably not want to use the exact model laid out ($2k salary plus company profit as dividends) in each country covered, you've got to establish some sort of baseline to be able to sensibly compare them!

I have considered doing a v2 where the starting point would be "$100k sitting in a company account" and the goal would "as much cash as possible in my personal account", but I'm not sure this would be particularly useful or any more realistic. For example, in Singapore the optimal strategy would be to draw zero salary and take out everything as tax-free dividends, but most entrepreneurs can't afford to wait a year to get any money at all.

For starters, at least half of your US tax rates are either wrong or wrongly applied. Beyond that, you'd have to pay me to spend the time to detail all of the inaccuracies. My hourly rate starts at $300.

How about one example before I hire you? The US tax rate computation is based on the MIT Living Wage calculator for personal taxes, and ZenPayroll for payroll taxes.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/places/0607567000 https://zenpayroll.com/blog/the-true-cost-to-hire-an-employe...

I don't know about this calculation, but I can tell you that as a salaried employee in Singapore at the local equivalent 100k USD a year, you'd pay around 5% in taxes without any deductions necessary. (That's around my situation.)

> Tax-wise, the US is among the worst places to be self-employed.

Singapore's a bit of an outlier - the government owns one of the busiest ports in the world, thus requires less income from tax compared to others.

If you compare the US to other Western democracies, how does it fare?

You'll definitely pay much less in taxes than you would in Belgium.

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