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Comment by sampo | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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

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.

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