How do you come to the 72%, I'm just interested.
Is that for all your income or "just" over a certain threshold?
>Even if you make some good money, that does not leave you with a lot to live.
You said you travelled to different countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. Do you consider that not leaving you with a lot to live?
>with virtually no deductible costs you pay taxes first, and then have to take care about health care, insurances and pension afterwards
Those are all, up to a certain degree, deductible from your taxes, right?
Regarding income tax, there is a tax free allowance of 9.984.
>You said you travelled to different countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. Do you consider that not leaving you with a lot to live?
We travel for more than 15 years and we mostly leverage so called PEP offers, which reduce your travel cost to a fraction of the real cost. Otherwise we'd not be able to afford that.
>Those are all, up to a certain degree, deductible from your taxes, right?
That's the point. They are NOT! The only deductible position would be an official pension insurance. If you invest on your own (which we do) you can not deduct a dime. Everything else we have to pay AFTER taxation.
>That's the point. They are NOT!
Your private pension might not be - but with Health Care, business expenses and certain type of insurances there's more than "virtually no deductible costs" though.
There's a lot of stuff that seems unfair, I agree. I'm not here to debate that you pay more into the system as others and don't get more benefits from it - but the picture you're painting of a 70 % overall tax rate and "not a lot to live on" strikes me as a bit too grim.
To compare cost of living: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp
Safety comparison: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp?title=2...
You should calculate the end % of tax. The 45% is the marginal rate. Also the solidarity tax has a ceiling
(And not everything is charged the full VAT rate)
And in the end, that number doesn't mean much? Switzerland for example had much lower tax, but your cost of life shot up. Some other places your income tax might be lower but sales taxes are higher.
It's all relative
Edit, as an example for 200kEUR in Berlin your tax will be ~ 43% (Cat I) - for 1MEUR/yr you're paying 46%
(this is not so much about Berlin or Germany - the math is the same everywhere - it's about people thinking that the rate means they pay that % of their salary)