India's super-rich peak tax rate, at 42.7%, now higher than USA
moneycontrol.com
moneycontrol.com
While villagers got free solar panels, funds for constructing bathroom, homes etc....some even got money during floods even when their place wasn't much affected.
And super rich have armies of lawyers and accountants ready to forge battle and use techniques to minimize their tax.
I felt bad for the middle class who in my opinion worked really long crushing hours and often stayed far away from families.
The kind of food/products army receives only upper middle class can afford them with their own money. And army even sells some of that subsided food to local people in return of cash.
I don't understand how can middle-class keep their heads down and simply pay whatever they are asked to pay?
Needless to say, many want to move to freer countries with less import duties, less taxation and more employment opportunities and better market.
Unless you are super rich, good luck buying Lamborghini in India. India is not a country where you can really enjoy fruit of your labor.
Every Government will come and they'll give away free money to people who are bottom of the rungs and leach this money off the middle class and this has been going on forever.
Super rich were never affect and still aren't affected.
And in India you need to work 5x as hard if not less to make same wages as your American counterpart, even then if you manage to make the same wage as someone I America, you'll find your money can only buy 1/3rd of the benefits an American can buy.
If your idea of a good life is to work hard and feed a family, congrats, it's possible in India but if you've more ambition and you want drones, you want cars, you want anything latest, hell even an iphone, you can't afford that unless you make 3x of someone in America.
It's the legal version of Robin hood going around who just woo people at the bottom by fleecing from them who are the middle and letting super rich fleece from both government and the middle class.
I am just a foreigner in India with an Indian wife, so my understanding might be limited but I went to meet many public sector and private sector employee and guess what? Even if a public sector person on paper makes less wages than private sector one, they always had bigger houses (their own) and bigger cars and often more properties. How do I know? My wife was friends with many of them and they were always talking about property prices.
Was not aware that I was supposed to buy that. But with that Lamborghini out of the way your description is qiite spot on. The irony is that the elected party is supposed to be the middle class' darling. That other parties have ignored the middle class has been one of their favorite narratives.
where in the world is this otherwise?
There are other "luxuries" that middle-class Indians can afford if they're earning at least the lower-end of American-level salaries. Early retirement, reasonably affordable healthcare and education, properties far away from cities and affordable labor to work them, more affordable house-help (cooks, house-maids, nannies).
Speaking personally as someone who has lived in a first-world country and who's now living in India, I find that free time is more valuable to me than drones or Lamborghinis or iphones. Not saying that things are ideal in India - far from it, in fact. But living in India does have its positive side as well.
So about the same as in the US these days, if you count all the non-federal income taxes that Americans pay.
We moved cities and in this new city I went to a private school that took the rich but also kids of government employees since they wanted to play nice with the powers that be.
Then I went to a public university that gave me excellent education for which I paid next to nothing. That in turn got me a scholarship at a major US research university where I got paid to study.
In other words, I had all the support from a poor society to succeed. Sure, I worked hard, but so does every manual laborer, car driver, restaurant worker, house maid and farmer. And guess what: they get very little for their efforts. Meanwhile the people they work for have drivers and maidservants and care givers and what not. That's an unequal society.
I don't want a drone. I would much rather the world had way fewer cars. What I would like is lush forests, cities with sidewalks, good public transport, healthcare for everyone. And the ability to dream a future that's different from Lamborghinis. Perhaps seven dimensional universes in which you can turn a Lamborghini inside out and velcro the seats to a lamp post.
If I may say so, you know very little about India, about what middle class means, what poverty means and what privileges come from making $10000 a year.
My taxes should be higher.
[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/number-of-crorepatis...
50 crore == 50 million, so a USD equivalent of $729,550 a year. Would go a long way in India.
Can't find reliable figures for wages, but from a quick Google, one site put it at about <$2k a year. Taking that as a rough order of magnitude it would be the equivalent of levying a tax on American earning over $7M per year (if average wages are about ~$20k).
Even if you take away 50% of the money from middle-class, it will not be sufficient to improve the quality of life of the people at bottom.
This scheme isn't going to work, it just snatches resources from the ones who can somehow integrate with the global economy and gives to those who have no idea what to do with it.