While at it, we could also change pension system. If your kids emigrate (or you didn't have any), then you get only half of the minimum payout :)
That's why I don't trust the pension system - too many people opining what we should do with the money. Let's borrow from the budget to pay pensions, or let's borrow from pensions to fix the budget, or let's invest pensions in stocks (which might crush), or let's raise the age, or let's add new rules.
I just want to save some money for old age, I don't want my savings to be redistributed 20 years from now by some new rules just invented. If I can't be sure of the pension then it's not fulfilling its role as an assurance that I'll be prepared when the time comes.
By contrast the primary expense of living in the 'East' is food and energy. For many people, housing is practically or exactly free.
The Serbian population is already down about a million people from its peak: https://www.populationpyramid.net/serbia/2019/
There is a lot of cheap real-estate out there outside cities.
What might make more sense is to have food kitchens and standardised subsidised housing for the poor and out of work. This kind of work could be done super-efficiently at a national level.
The other factor is that things like pension and welfare expenses are basically known expenses. It doesn't make sense to charge a % of consumption or income (thereby disincentivizing both of them). Just share the burden across everyone of working age with a poll tax, and to the rich with a property tax (with a credit for the number of children under age 16, to avoid penalizing families). You can find other externalities to tax like drugs, road use, and fossil fuels.
The USA, UK, Scandinavia, Australia have embraced these kind of transparent and simple taxes, and their societies are much wealthier because of them.
Eh, scandinavia doesn't use poll taxes but all have progressive tax rates (Just like the rest of northern Europe)? And AFAIK the UK and US also use progressive tax rates?
This is nonsense. All of these states have complex and much higher rates of income tax than Serbia, plus consumption taxes.
The UK tried a poll tax once and there were riots, up to a third of people refused to pay and it was one of the main reasons a Prime Minister of 11 years lost her job to someone who promised to replace it. And that was a relatively low one just to fund local services with a reduced rate for registered unemployed. Of all the potential income tax alternatives it is undoubtedly the worst.
It makes far more sense to distribute the burden of paying for pensions according to current ability to afford it than to force people to pay money they don't have into a scheme which simply promises to give it back decades later if they're still alive.
Secondarily we will print money to finance Government spending, and you will 'pay' for it through inflation.
Meanwhile the rich can avoid VAT by purchasing expensive personal electronics and cars through their companies and getting rebated, and see their asset portfolios increase in value thanks to the money printing.
If the psychological element of paying poll taxes is too extreme, just replace them with land taxes with credits for each citizen living there and large credits for children under 16. At least you can link the payment to the consumption of a resource (housing) and penalty if you don't pay (confiscation or the application of a lien).
Of course land value taxes are unpopular in European countries with a huge class of landed gentry...
Even with the current system, you can easily move to countryside, live in super cheap rundown house, do little work for cash and avoid taxes :) Abandoned gardens could replace food kitchens if you invest some time to preserve food in fall.
Yet most people ain't interested in that. And if we allow the masses to escape welfare, I'm sure they won't resort to above lifestyle when life gets difficult.
Jain, as the Germans say. The combination of immigration into several major metropolitan hubs with almost all good jobs being there is what drives the housing prices up. What is "natural size" of San Francisco? It used to be close to 0 some 200 years ago.
There is plenty of cheap property in rural areas of Europe that are too far from the next Top 10 city to facilitate a daily commute there and back again. You can literally buy houses in remote Italian countryside for 1 euro if you promise to stay there as an inhabitant. And no one wants to stay in rural Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in East Germany, even the asylum seekers from Pakistan of Afghanistan get on the first train and leave.
A shift to remote work could alleviate some of that upward pressure.