Hacker News Reader

Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

This is why the debate about taxes in America is not like it is in Europe.

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.

View on HN

Turns out it costs a lot of money to have a « war on drugs », « war on terror », « war on crime » and so on.

Not sure about the results though.

A very large chunk of federal taxes are for UBI and universal healthcare for old people

But doesn't Germany also provide those?

That’s the case for a lot of european countries and they get much more from it.

Basically every country in Europe (and many elsewhere) is able to offer both of these, plus universal healthcare for everyone, often with a similar tax burden. Social Security and Medicare aren't the problem here.

>often with a similar tax burden

This isn't true

> A very large chunk of federal taxes are for UBI and universal healthcare for old people

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.)

Social Security retirement benefits.

Again, benefits for that (including whether you get any at all) are based on quantity of qualifying income, adjusted by wage index from the year earned. Its not remotely a UBI. A UBI is given at a fixed amount to all members of the eligible class, which is not determined by income past or present.

The letter U in UBI means something. Social security is not universal. It's not even universal for retired people -- you have to pay into the system while you work to get the benefits when you retire.

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.

> It is becoming increasingly tiresome to see any benefit touted as UBI.

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...

Social security is funded via its own payroll tax (and hasn't dipped into the general fund yet, quite the opposite), so you can discount 6.2% for that right away. But for many people who make too little to pay much federal/state tax, that is a huge hit for them.

Europe also has a "« war on drugs », « war on terror », « war on crime » and so on.". Outside of a few outliers like Portugal drugs are still very illegal in Europe, and in some cases Europe is even stricter than America about things like marijuana.

Besides, that is not where the money is going.

Completely disagree. If we compare incarceration rates, surveillance programs, sentencing guidelines, etc. it is very clear that European and American policies are incomparable. Almost half of US discretionary spending goes to the military. The impact of incarceration in the US is estimated at 6% of GDP. And the drug situation speaks for itself.

https://nicic.gov/economic-burden-incarceration-us-2016

Europe is much more aggressive in drug enforcement than the USA. They sort of nip the problem in the bud before it becomes an even larger problem, which is where America fails. You really don't want to mess with the Swiss police.

America kind of teeters between doing nothing and coming in very punitively.

The Swiss police? Is it some kind of jokes? They are doing strictly nothing against drug dealing, and the judges are just as bad. https://www.24heures.ch/en-finir-avec-les-toilettes-de-la-ho... https://www.illustre.ch/magazine/crack-a-geneve-le-quai-9-so... etc not like it's any better in the Swiss German part.

This is not the same proportions at all.

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.

Europe has a completely different approach to crime. Superficially many jurisdictions in Europe are way more strict than anywhere in the USA. For example in Switzerland you will go to prison for driving 45MPH.

You can also go to prison in a number of EU countries for possession of marijuana.

Not to negate terrible U.S. Government spending on all kinds of worthless things, but go have a look at the U.S. federal budget (see below) and see for yourself where the absolute biggest outlays go. For 2022, of the 6.8 trillion official budget, a whopping 4.8 trillion went to mandatory, mostly social spending, most of which was for social security (over 1 trillion) and medicaid/medicare (roughly 1.2 trillion between both).

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.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58268

I’ve heard this a lot, but I don’t buy it.

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.

My rule of thumb is that the top 20% have a better quality of life in the US than in West Europe, at the expense of the bottom 50%. I'm not sure how the UK fits in this. My personal impression from living there for a few years around 2015 was that it's poorer than the average West European country.

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.

The US has six public single-payer health systems (I forget them all) and spends more on them than European countries do on their universal healthcare systems without providing universal healthcare.

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.

> 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.

> It would probably mean less profit for those sellers though.

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.

"free"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com