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Comment by jazzyk | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit simplistic.

If you are in a high-tax state, your employees will pay a lot in taxes, and the cost is passed on to you, their employer. You will need to pay them enough to pay 40% in taxes and have some money left for living expenses.

Which may make your startup (or any business, really) uncompetitive, or even infeasible compared to low-tax countries/states.

There needs to be a cautious balance between providing social support (which I am all for) and overtaxing. For me, the most important part is the amount of tax money that actually goes to benefit the people who need it, rather than the bureaucracy.

In the US, the value we get for our taxes is VERY low.

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> Which may make your startup (or any business, really) uncompetitive, or even infeasible compared to low-tax countries/states.

Well, you could have a "unicorn or bust" strategy, chasing primarily high margin b2b and b2c products so big salaries aren't a dealbreaker.

Of course, I just described the current SV startup scene, including why things like Juicero get funded while affordable real estate development is a comparatively unattractive investment.

The flip side is of course:

If you are in a low-tax state, your employees (or you) will pay a lot for things like health care and retirement, and the cost is passed on to you, their employer. You will need to pay them enough to pay those costs and have some money left for living expenses.

Humans, in general, are not good at delayed gratification or long term planning. They don't plan for health care expenses or save enough for retirement. As a result, your employees will for the most part, happily defer those costs which means those costs don't go into the calculus for how much your employees need to get paid to do the work you need of them.

That's the price you pay for having a big country, there are quite a few benefits you enjoy from this -- carve it up into more easily manageable jurisdictions or deal with it. A bigger fraction of your tax dollars being absorbed by the bureaucracy in the US compared to let's say Canada or Estonia isn't something that can be changed -- your Congress doesn't seem to have an appetite for trimming waste or implementing responsible oversight. How is the Great Wall of Trump doing btw? ;)

More relevant is that a vastly larger fraction of your tax dollars go to things related to the military-industrial complex, aka "defense".

Naw. Take a look at the percentage of GDP the US spent on the military -- 3.3% according to wikipedia, higher than average overall but less than average if you look at other countries that are actively using their militaries -- not necessarily correct unless the mechanics of the tax system are known but it is a vastly closer approximation than what your comment implied.

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