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Comment by briHass | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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