Shocking, coming from Germany, where the tax (minus health insurance) was almost exactly the same percentage, but I get a *lot* less for it.
Europeans get a lot more for their tax dollars than Americans.
If you add up federal, state, local, and property taxes, the tax burden of many Americans is just as high as what Europeans pay and we don't get free health care or anywhere near the level of social safety net that Europeans do. The money is being spent inefficiently.
When you see Americans vote against tax increases, don't be tempted to think it's because we don't want better government services. We vote against tax increases because we know we don't get good value for the money we pay, and paying more isn't going to fix that.
Not sure about the results though.
Rather separate subject but relevant too: Defense spending is utterly dwarfed by these, and even for its huge existing defense spending, you can barely expect the U.S. to not keep it high as a major world power that is in effect obligated by many allies to tacitly protect them from the other major hostile powers in the world.
A quick look at the Ukraine situation right now and when that war started demonstrates this clearly: many pundits complaining about the U.S. military system but all major European states preferring its presence to its absence when Russia finally went and did something Really Dumb. Guess how many important Asian countries also tacitly depend on the same for vague protection from China.
Besides, that is not where the money is going.
America kind of teeters between doing nothing and coming in very punitively.
Compare how much of the GDP of European countries went into invading foreign countries?
Our how much is spent to arrest, judge and jail people. The number of people in jail in the USA for drug related crimes is completely insane.
We don't have UBI for old people (a pension system that you are eligible for based on aggregate amount of prior qualifying income is not a UBI.)
It is becoming increasingly tiresome to see any benefit touted as UBI. UBI mean universal benefits. If there are any criteria that prevent a person from receiving a benefit, it's not UBI -- it's just another benefit of the sort we've had for decades.
This is an explicit right wing talking point designed to raise the retirement age or abolish social security entirely.
Just imagine what GPT-4 will do to online propaganda...
This isn't true
My friends in London lose at least half their equity value to taxes, have to buy 1000yr leases, and seem to be generally poorer than their counterparts in the US.
Anecdotal, but the US is a rich country with I suspect a lower lower bound and a higher median quality of life per dollar.
Before you say the UK isn’t Europe it’s even worse in the EU imo.
The European welfare state usually works best for people who live "normal" lives. You get more for your taxes if you get education, have kids, and work a full career until the nominal retirement age. The American system works better for those who don't have kids or try to make a lot of money and retire early.
I suspect that private profits are much higher in the US though, since that is supposed to be the incentive. I know that I would pay quite a bit of profit to someone in order to save my own life, and I imagine that people with children feel similarly about their lives.
It's not any great secret either, listen to Obama talk about healthcare back in the day, and the phrase he always used was, "bend the cost curve". I would think the obvious solution would be to set up one actual single-payer and then use monopsony power to force costs down. It would probably mean less profit for those sellers though.
I think everyone knows that is what Obama really wanted to do, but it was not politically possible at the time even in his own party, and it's still not possible today.
A useful exercise in understanding US healthcare:
Jump onto your search engine of choice and pull up a list of Fortune 500 companies. Take a look at the Top 10 and Top 50 companies. Once you see how many of them are healthcare related you'll understand why the US Gov and US Taxpayer get charged so much for so little.
The peace of mind that if we have a medical emergency that we won't have to pay 5 or 6 figures out just for an ER visit + surgery is HUGE.
The issue with places like NY, LA, SF, is that they are currently transitionary places. Its a place where you go work for a bit to build up your career, then leave to go somewhere with a much cheaper cost of living, significantly below EU for the comparatively same standard of living (unless you are on the lower end of the income scale where you definitely get more in EU).
A small minority of people stick around because their respective industry is in those cities (finance for NY, entertainment for LA), but they also get compensated way above the median/mean.
In EU, on the other hand, cities are places where people live normally at all income levels.
As someone who was born and raised in NY. No. People do actually live lives independent of what they do in the outer boroughs. Entire communities and generations of families. Far more significant that a small minority.
Seriously I need HN to understand what makes up NYC beyond Manhattan and gentrified Brooklyn.
With respect to defense budget, one of the reasons the US economy is so strong is because of its military. Since WWII America has expanded its sphere of influence to encompass the entire world and dating back to the Monroe doctrine has operated with a 'f--- around and find out' attitude, that only works if you have the military hence why so much is spent on force projection. As a result the US has relatively unfettered access to natural resources, favourable exports/trade policies, IP protection (e.g. semiconductor exports to China) and economic power (e.g. the petrodollar) which stems from being the biggest and baddest. It can certainly be argued to what extent we still need to be doing this, but its not as simple as 'spend less on defense', or your sanctions won't mean anything anymore and there will be far less incentive for foreign powers to act in ways that are favourable to American interests. I don't know the answer to this question but the discussions by foreign policy experts have led me to believe this is far more complicated than it seems.
With respect to healthcare efficiency, looking at $ spent/resident is overly inflated. All healthcare systems are terribly inefficient with different tradeoffs, absolutely agree that it needs improving, but it's also not as bad as the media would have you believe. Another reason the US spends so much is that the level of care for complex cases is also much higher than anywhere else in the world and almost all major medical advances and research comes out of the US. Looking at Canada we are at historic lows in research spending and there are countless treatments we do not offer.
In both of these scenarios it's also worth noting that a large chunk of both expenditures goes towards paying salaries (and most to non-executives), so 'spending' at face value is not necessarily 'bad'.
Are you're basing that on the number of clinical trials compared to other countries or regions using the data from the WHO [1]?
As someone who worked for a large pharma company for almost 10 years I'd say it's easy to think that when in reality it's just easier to conduct clinical trials in the US compared to, for example, the EU. With the US market having the highest margins for pharmaceuticals and no ban on ads for prescription medicine it's also important to spend as much time in the US market while still under patent protection. A quicker way to enter the US market is by doing clinical trials in the US.
The company I worked for is global (like most pharma companies) and, depending on the indication, the research is actually more likely to not have been conducted in the US.
[1]: https://www.who.int/observatories/global-observatory-on-heal...
I made my statement on the basis of research productivity[0] (of course there will be some bias in this) and personal experience as a physician.
I'm less aware of pharmaceuticals as that's not my area of expertise (radiology) but medical devices, emerging imaging technology and oncology and clinical research are certainly dominated by U.S. researchers/institutions.
There are of course areas where other countries are equally strong/stronger due to niche powerhouses or disease prevalence (e.g. cardiovascular surgery in Germany, hepatobiliary disease in Japan) but even then the US is still a near peer and if you throw a dart at a list of guidelines you'll practically always find an American institution driving it or playing a large part.
A particularly striking and easy to assess example is in oncology where AJCC/NCCN basically set the standard, 5 of the top 10 cancer centres are US[1] (and the delta between the top 2 and the rest is very large) and the standardized imaging guidelines (e.g. BI-RADS for breast cancer which is now adopted worldwide) come out of America. Consequently these institutions get a lot of $$$ from donors and international patients (e.g. Sheikh Zayed buildings at Hopkins and MD Anderson).
As another example we can look at 7T MRI installations (effectively pointless for clinical use at this time), there are approximately the same number of units installed in the US as the entirety of Europe[2] although most/the best magnets are made by Siemens. Now for a technology like this to enter routine clinical practice someone has to show that it's actually better to justify the cost and these studies are mostly coming out of the US as it's easier to collaborate, conduct clinical research with large enough sample sizes, and there's (effectively) unlimited $ to waste on experimental ideas that may/may not pan out.
Once that research is done (which is more important than the industry funded pilots) and is shown to be better, other countries can just adopt it without taking on the risk of funding a new procedure/surgery/treatment regimen that takes away $ from someone else in a zero-sum public system. It's not that other countries don't have smart people or discover things it's just incredibly hard and/or pointless from a resource perspective to compete with the US who also culturally value 'being the best' (both vs. the rest of the world and vs. each other) and afford their clinicians generous/mandatory protected time to divert from clinical duties to scholarly activities (definitely true for Canada, UK and Germany where I have interacted with the most physicians).
[0]https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=2700
[1]https://www.newsweek.com/worlds-best-specialized-hospitals-2...
[2]https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1dXG84OZIAOxjsq...
Social Security, Unemployment & Labor: 39.63%
Medicare & Health: 22.67%
Military: 10.91%
Education: 6.21%
Interest on Debt: 4.27%
Veteran's Benefits: 4.27%
Everything Else: 12.04%
To be clear, it's still ridiculous to pay hundreds of dollars a month extra just to live in the five boroughs but 10% would be unmanageable
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/finance/downloads/pdf/22pdf/busin...
This is almost exactly what comes out of my paychecks every two weeks, and no I don’t get much back at the end of the year.
You are guaranteed to get it by law. The problem is that the law can be changed to remove that guarantee. There isn't much we can really do to prevent that.
The narrative about SS running out of money is about the desire/need to change the law, not that the guarantee can't/won't be met.
You’ll just be extremely old, far beyond working age, and it wont keep up with actual inflation, so you can’t live on it.
Should see social security disability.
Got to be able to live for a year or more on no income at all while case managers decide that your horrific injuries don’t interfere with ability to work.
Sure, it's cool to get a job paying six figures in NYC out of college. But once you've paid your:
- rent (first and last up front, ofc)
- broker fees (often > 1 month's rent!)
- state taxes
- city taxes
- federal taxes
- social security
- massively inflated city grocery prices
- student loan dues
...you realize that you basically only exist to launder money between corporations. It especially sucks when you're just trying to start out with a net worth of less than zero and you're still paying this massive tax rate.
And before anyone mentions student loan interest deductions and federal tax deductions for state and local: they make very little difference, in my experience. Maybe others have figured out how to make that system work for them, especially before the Trump SALT deduction cap.
NYC is a cool city, of course -- probably the best city in the US -- but I'm not sure it's worth the 50% tax rate for decidedly middle class earners. At this point I'd have to make north of $400k/year to justify moving back to NYC because of those insane taxes.
If you take the correct risks you basically don't pay taxes.
If you try to avoid risk, you pay the highest taxes. So if you are just trying to have income and savings, enjoy your 39% taxes and nothing to show for it.