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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

The breakdown is:

- Working professionals making low 6 figures (espicially in states with income taxes) pay much closer to EU taxes than most people think.

- Non professional jobs (service industry and blue-collar) are taxed very lightly, but have worse benefits, less job protection, and an extremely limited social safety net.

- Government jobs have better benefits than other non-professional jobs, but often the pay is not great (I suspect no better than EU, but honestly have no clue what e.g. a postal worker in the EU makes).

- The very wealthy are taxed very lightly compared to the EU.

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Agree with most of this. Although to be fair the social safety net is not as weak in the US as most people think, either. The majority of the Federal government's budget goes to Medicare and Social Security, the main gap is just that for working-aged people there is no universal healthcare in the US.

Not sure what you mean by the last point, though, it kind of conflicts with your first point. And in e.g. France the capital gains rate is 19% I believe vs 20% in the US. Various countries in Europe have experimented with a wealth tax, but they've now all gotten rid of it. In what ways are the very wealthy taxed heavier in the EU?

> Agree with most of this. Although to be fair the social safety net is not as weak in the US as most people think, either.

No way. It's almost impossible to become homeless in Sweden while you have the entire homeless villages everywhere. People with disability get paid a living income and are allowed to save money, which they aren't in the US. Then we have tons of other services like child care, health care and universally just way better everything regarding infrastructure and social service. I've lived half my life in each place and honestly the difference is Grand Canyon sized. Even Portugal, one of the poorest still has great free healthcare and all kinds of social safety net sand services.

America is the only country that doesn't offer any type of parental leave.

You might get two or three days or something like that, and then everyone pats themselves on the back saying how progressive we are.

It's absolutely horrific when you consider people may have medical issues which cause them to need to take a bit more time off.

But guess what, you now have insane medical bills, and pressure to get back to work. It's not unheard of for a woman to just get fired if she takes off too much time for a pregnancy.

Sure, that's illegal, but workers are treated so horribly in America. You're lucky to get your paycheck half the time.

Depends on the job. At my job men get 3 months and women get 6 months paid parental leave when a baby is born.

What percentage of the population has access to this kind of job with benefits in the US?

For Sweden it's close to 100%.

No idea. My company employees tens of thousands of people who all of this access. What I don't know is how many more also have similar benefits. I would guess most large companies give this sort of benefit.

>Today, only 21% of US workers have access to paid family leave through their employers, even though, according to the Pew Research Center in 2015, both parents work full-time in almost half all two-parent families.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210624-why-doesnt-the...

According to Wikipedia Sweden has a higher rate of homelessness per capita than the United States.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeles...

These lists are almost always useless for comparisons since the definitions between countries vary so widely.

edit: Digging into the sources, the US has 6.4 unsheltered homeless per 10k, but Sweden doesn't even track unsheltered homeless, the most acute category (at 4.5/10k) also contains people in immediate access shelter/hospice.

This is a fair point. To Wikipedia's credit, I think it's adequately addressed in the article I linked.

I think a more general statement could be made. It's nearly useless to make comparisons between countries. The United States cannot adopt Swedish policies and expect to achieve Swedish outcomes. I'd much prefer we discuss policies for our countries in our own contexts rather than introducing comparisons between them.

The parent comment introduced a comparison, though. So, I think it's only fair to introduce some form of statistics.

Thanks for providing a more founded empirical interpretation of the facts! It seems Sweden has some edge on the USA, but the original claim (that it's almost impossible to be homeless in Sweden) still seems as unfounded as I expected.

As another commentator noted, I think climate is something to consider. I expect that you'll find higher concentrations of shelter-less people in more temperate (or at least warm) places. Cultures will evolve to prevent people from needlessly dying, but we aren't inclined to give more than the bare minimum.

> The United States cannot adopt Swedish policies and expect to achieve Swedish outcomes. I'd much prefer we discuss policies for our countries in our own contexts rather than introducing comparisons between them.

And this isn't what anyone seriously proposing for the US to take control of its social issues to do. The mention of other countries usually is just to show it can be done, to be inspired by it and forge your own way to solve social issues.

I don't know why it's usually taken in this absolutist view, where solutions should be implemented as-is because it worked somewhere else. It worked, get inspired by it and figure a way out of the hole in your own local environment...

Yeah, Sweden and the US are different, people are still people and have some overlapping needs, learn how others have done instead of this hubris of "we're different". Everyone is.

I think it would be quite difficult to even survive long-term as an unsheltered person in Sweden, right?

Yes, come October-November all the way to March-April and it'd be extremely hard to live 6 months of the year in a tent on freezing temperatures.

I'm not from Sweden but I'd expect homelessness there to be almost never caused purely by financial difficulties or unemployment. The vast majority of homelessness in the Nordic countries is either due to mental health or substance abuse problems, or a combination of financial difficulties and other compounding factors such as those.

GP probably meant it's almost impossible to become homeless in Sweden because of a lack of a social safety net alone.

That's exactly the case.

And one bit of Swedish society that is a bit invisible to the outside: it has an extremely draconian approach to drug abuse. Even though it's a Nordic country and touted for being socially progressive, drug policy here is extremely regressive when compared to Portugal or the Netherlands.

So usually the homeless I see in Stockholm are addicts (alcohol, heroin, amphetamines) that fall through the cracks of the system as they won't stop abusing substances which Swedish policies have no way around to help them, it's extremely punitive for drug use, as even use is a criminal offence. In the case you are taken in custody by the police they may force a drug test and if detected you'll be punished.

This all compounds to leave a marginalised population that has inadequate support to fight their addictions (usually caused by mental health issues) and kept in limbo between the streets and courts to be ordered to get clean.

Yeah that list is meaningless. You won't see homeless camps of homelesd, almost never see a homeless person and if a homeless person doesn't want to be homeless anymore then they suddenly aren't (I know of precisely one exception to this.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

Sweden: 36 homeless + 7 incarcerated per 10k

U.S.: 17 homeless + 64 incarcerated per 10k

Yeah, don't believe everything you read on the Internet. That list has little to do with actual reality here. You won't see homeless camps of homelesd, almost never see a homeless person and if a homeless person doesn't want to be homeless anymore then they suddenly aren't (I know of precisely one exception to this.)

All that list means is the US vastly under-counts actual homeless people. This is the same well known effect we see in suicide statistics: Sweden just keeps far more accurate statistics.

I disagree.

> the main gap is just that for working-aged people there is no universal healthcare in the US

What about those who have health insurance but have huge medical bills?

You hit the out-of-pocket maximum for the year and then no longer pay anything on the bills.

Most upper middle class jobs offer different plans with different maximums and monthly payments.

and most european software engineers (uk/germany etc) their take home pay is similar to what a dev in the midwest would make i.e the rest of the usa. not SV salaries that people like to post about as if they're the norm

Do you have some links that show the tax burden for Europe vs US is similar for low 6-figure earners? I can find plenty of calculators that estimate total tax burden for the US states, but not most European countries.

For example, I used someone in New Jersey (a US state known to be high-tax) vs France at a salary of 100K (which is the same in Euros now!): In NJ, including Federal, state and sales taxes, total tax is $27K. That seems to be a far cry from the $41K (sorry, Euro) I get in France from a very basic calculator that only includes country-level taxes AFAICT.

In Germany, the total taxes on 100K is 34%. The marginal rate is 44%. That's before deductions, which in Germany will be plentiful.

At that level you will pay 800€ per month for public health insurance (it's a percentage up to about 65K income, then capped). Public health insurance allows you to cover children and non-working spouses for free.

https://www.bmf-steuerrechner.de/ekst/eingabeformekst.xhtml

Is the 800€ the maximum paid per month since it already reached the cap? Does the company subsidize any of that?

Yes (15%, cap at 65k income). Yes (for the company it’s like a payroll tax, they also pay 15%, capped at 65k).

So the premiums are not too different between US and Germany. The two advantages I see with Germany is the premiums are proportional to income and likely costs of procedures and medications are better negotiated by the government. Do you have to deal with copay (a small amount you pay per procedure)?

If you are curious about US insurance plans, here is California website for estimating insurance costs. Basically the costs scale with income, number of individuals and their age and their desired level of coverage.

https://apply.coveredca.com/lw-shopandcompare/

Note that France has one of the highest levels of government spending as a share of GDP (and hence represented by taxes, though this includes sales taxes/VATs/etc/etc) in Europe, at 62% or so.

For comparison, Germany is at 51%, UK at 50%, Netherlands at 47%.

Belgium is close to France at about 61%...

The US (not in Europe, obviously) is at 46%.

And Switzerland at 36%; this is the European outlier in the opposite direction from France.

But a priori, just from this data I would expect French taxes to be about 1.4x US taxes and Dutch taxes to be similar to US ones...

The very wealthy are even taxed less in EU. The biggest tax is income tax, the wealthy do not have income they own stuff.

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