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Comment by DZittersteyn | Hacker News Reader

The highest tax rate in the Netherlands is 51,95% (Note that this only covers anything you make over ~70k+ a year, 0-20k is taxed ~35%, and 20-70 is taxed 40%). Then you pay 6-21% VAT over anything you buy, so yeah, in some scenarios you definitely lose >50% of your gross income to taxes.

https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/...

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> Note that this only covers anything you make over ~70k+ a year, 0-20k is taxed ~35%, and 20-70 is taxed 40%

Which means that you'd need an income over 480k a year to get an effective tax rate >50%.

I hope I calculated that correctly: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+((x-70)*0.5195%2B...

> Then you pay 6-21% VAT over anything you buy, so yeah, in some scenarios you definitely lose >50% of your gross income to taxes.

If you count VAT, you'd also need to take into account all the benefits you get in return from the state.

You don't just count VAT, let's count everything: 150%-250% taxes on energy, ridiculous amount of fees and duties. As a Dane, we're probably the most taxed in the world and for a high earning software engineer it's approaching 75%.

The state enables a lot of stuff for you in return though, which we'd also have to count as a benefit if we "count everything". It's just infeasible to come up with a concrete number of how much they "take away" from your earned money.

I have the same benefits in the US as in Denmark (more or less). In the US the government take 25% of my income in Denmark it was around 75%. Personally I don't think the extra 50% is worth it. The only ones better off in Denmark is the minimum wage earners.

I highly doubt it's that simple, sorry.

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