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Comment by benkuykendall | Hacker News Reader

Although Switzerland and America may have very different work cultures and social support policies, that's not the most obvious difference. Consider our per-capita GDPs (2013, nominal dollars)[1]:

   Switzerland    84,748
   United States  53,042

So even if the US passed new employment laws and embraced work-life balance, we would still have only 63% of Switzerland's money to spend on each person. I'm not saying that the US couldn't improve its working conditions, but its unavoidable that a wealthier nation will have resources to treat its working class well.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=switzerland+vs+united+s...

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The picture looks very different if you use purchasing power parity; per Wikipedia, which cites roughly the same nominal per-capita GDPs, in PPP dollars:

  Switzerland     58,731
  United States   54,596

If you then factor in the demographics....

Just to make comparison even more complicated, I assume in Switzerland you don't need to pay as much for health insurance, and put as much money aside for retirement, and people in US do. And I know college fees in Switzerland are around 1000 to 3000 per year, not 10 000 to 40 000 like in US. So if you have kids, you don't need to save for their college. (...But then you can only send them to European universities. If you want to send them to a US university, you still need to save money for that.)

That's the reason I used GDP per capita instead of after-tax income. Even if employees do not need to pay for insurance, retirement, or schooling, the nation as a whole still has to.

But that comparison is flawed too; I don't know about Switzerland, but e.g. both Canada and Israel have effective single payer healthcare systems, which cost half as much per capita as in the US, and deliver higher life expectancy with 100% coverage and no medical bankruptcies.

It's too complex to summarize it with just one number per country.

On the other hand you have to pay a lot more in taxes.

Switzerland has considerably lower taxes than the u.s. (I'm an american living in switzerland)

Incomes taxes or all taxes?

Income taxes.

As for sales tax, it's 7% here. Lower than most of Europe, and lower than some parts of the u.s., but not all parts of the u.s. But the low taxes more than make up for it. (about 1/2 compared to the u.s., but depends on your income level)

There's also a Value Added Tax (VAT), which probably makes comparing the Swiss and US systems difficult: https://www.ch.ch/en/vat-rates-switzerland/

I was writing about vat. That's basically sales tax. It looks like it's 8% now.

Hmmm, OK, although I note a VAT imposes higher compliance costs on an economy, and is harder to evade. And still, comparing to the US is very difficult, seeing as we have 50 state wide taxing regimes with much more complexity in what's taxed how much, many many many more local ones (the small-medium sized city I live just outside of has at least 3), and it's generally ignored on out of state mail order purchases.

Hard to compare, but probably not grossly larger in Switzerland.

I wonder how property taxes compare.

Ah, here we go, taxation as a % of GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tax-Revenues-As-GDP-Perce... Overall we, the US and Switzerland, track very well.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Switzerland which I'm just starting to look at.

/u/hga compared purchasing power, so taxes are already accounted for in the numbers above.

Purchasing power matters for stuff within a country, but swiss people still have more money that they can spend on imports.

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