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Comment by bluepizza | Hacker News Reader

I recommend visiting Sweden. The welfare system is falling apart, the population is increasingly hostile towards immigration, the average salary is rather low, while prices are high. It is not the best place for the poor, middle class, or the rich.

Meanwhile, it’s important to remind you that engineers are rarely involved with policymaking. They are not the problem. Heck, there isn’t even an union or guild for engineers.

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I’m using engineers as a California-specific example of upper middle class people (given the reference to Peter Thiel below). Sweden, and every other European country, pays for its welfare system by taxing middle class people. That makes sense because middle class people have most of the money. Facebook’s payroll is much bigger than the investment Zuckerberg makes every year. They don’t sit around complaining that we can’t have social services because the billionaires won’t pay for it.

And now those middle class people have the same problems unless they inherited wealth, while expected to fund both the young, the old and the weak.

Take GP's advice and go talk with some locals. Various countries with high taxes are watching their services fall apart. Taxing the middle class alone isn't the silver bullet you portay it as, and is only a small part of the entire system.

Taxing the middle class is a necessary condition of having a welfare state. The most remarkable difference between the American tax structure and those of European social democracies is that we have extremely low taxes on the middle and upper middle class. In the U.S. we have a lot of people complaining why we don't tax Peter Thiel to pay for universal healthcare, but that's not the reason we don't have universal healthcare.

In the face of an aging population and diminishing workforce, taxing the middle class may not be enough. But I am talking about an antecedent question.

Perhaps the influx of thousands of migrants per year is overwhelming the system? Why can’t their population raise concerns around this?

It most probably is. But OP’s point was that if engineers paid more taxes, all problems would be solved. And it’s not true - migrants also pay high taxes in Sweden.

My point here is that there isn’t a single solution for very complex systemic issues. Pinning the blame on middle classes is wrong and unproductive.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/14/swedish-pm-con...

They voted for a very anti-immigration right wing party.

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