"The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 percent in 2014." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_agai...
In Ireland you pay 20% income tax on the first €35,300, and 40% on income above this amount (if you are a single person, there are different cut-offs for married people and one-parent families).
You also pay an additional Universal Social Charge on all income over €13,000 - between 2-8% depending on your income level, or 11% for self-employed income over €100,000. Add on pay related social insurance (PRSI) of 4% too.
It’s at 15 percent for people earning the median wage (€3,300), meaning half of all Germans pay 15 percent or less of their salary in income tax. Your range if very far removed from reality. (It is true, though, that for very high incomes 35 percent aren’t the ceiling, that’s somewhere in the forties if you are making several hundred thousand per month.)
I already included the Soli in my calculations and church tax is strictly optional.
Are you sure about that they are not taxes? Those payments are decided based on a percentage of your income and are mandatory, which really sounds like a tax.
Mandatory insurances/payments are taxes in disguise, where you support other people directly for a specific purpose, unlike indirectly for a general purpose. Either way, the state gets the money and distributes it, just like a tax.