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When you don’t have to struggle for a living, you’re more free to take risks and start your own business. Workers accept disruptive innovation and being let go, knowing that the state will help them reskill if necessary.
Edit: Changed sentence from "earn a million dollars" to "30 million dollars" to reflect the actual video contents. (Mea culpa.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_...
USA demolishing most everyone else, as you'd expect if you own what you create. Almost 10% of 400 million people are millionaires in the USA! Insanely productive all things considered.
Also kind of shockingly the USA has the most progressive tax system, I believe -- the vast majority of those paying are high earners, low earners pay barely any taxes and can save a lot.
Beyond that, we have an issue where corporations and high-net worth individuals aren’t paying taxes, which could prevent onerous taxes on the middle class. No nation really taxes the rich (cf. the Panama Papers).
Basically, if you have enough equity, a bank will loan you the money you need, while you can leave those stocks untouched. You don't have to pay any tax, let alone the extremely preferential capital gains tax.
The Whitehouse in 2021 estimated that the 400 wealthiest families paid around an 8% income tax (https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/09/23/...).
US has a tax gap of perhaps $1 trillion, and much of that is wealthy Americans who are too hard to pursue: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/business/irs-tax-gap.html. That could be 50% of the bill if we were able to cut healthcare expenses by dropping insurance companies, removing pharma control of prices, etc., to try to attain similar OECD healthcare costs.
The US is in a unique situation. We have to both reduce the amount of rent-seekers within the healthcare system while increasing the taxes we levy on the wealthy. Universal care might mean an increase in taxes on the middle-class, but universal care will ultimately reduce their expenses since it's more efficient.
PS. Please don't attack people personally: it's much better to say, "This comment does not account for X," than "You seem very uniformed [sic]?"
PPS. If you need a poignant example of the failure of the US healthcare system, look no further than maternal mortality rates. What a disgrace.
In other words, a 42% federal income tax plus (roughly) a 20% federal sales tax.
The maximum payroll tax is 42% for incomes above 62k Euros. The part of income below has a tax excempt amount of ~10k, then a linear progressive tax. (There is an rate of 45% for incomes over 250k, but let’s skip that for the argument.)
There are also some tax reducing things, but let’s say you have a taxable gross income in the range of 60k. The deductions are as follows: - 25% payroll tax (which is the tax _average_, only the amount above 62k is taxed with 42%) - 7.3% healthcare (or 14.6% if you are self-employed) - some percentage for other public insurances
Gives you around 65% net income, from which you pay 19% VAT for most things you buy as consumer. But e.g. rent doesn’t have a VAT.
If your income is higher (as I wrote in my other comment), the healthcare / public insurance cost is capped, so every Euro above 62k is taxed with 42 (or 45) percent. If your income is lower you simply pay less taxes (relatively) and might have 80% or more net income.
Edit: forgot about tax average …
Now here's how it works in the US. Let's take my $170K household income (it's 2x of state median in Massachusetts, but 1x in my town). My effective tax rate (without medical insurance and without employer part of payroll taxes) is 33%, but with employer taxes and after tax base adjustment it's going to be (0.33 + 0.08) / 1.08 = 38% (I'm ignoring social security cap here, but it won't make a big difference). But we left out a very important part, and it's medical insurance. Let's add 24K/year (14%) to the mix, then it becomes (0.33 + 0.08 + 0.14) / 1.22 = 45%. Oops! Sounds like I'm paying the same percentage as in Germany. Sure, I have 2x of median, but for 1x things are getting even more ugly, because 24K will stay the same, and while the income tax is lower, medical will take its part and more.
Of course I still bring home more than an average German family, yet expenses are different too so it's hard to compare. Sure, I can buy more junk, and I have a bigger home so I still have some place to live after I placed all that junk :) But to the original comment:
> The American lower and middle classes pay a lot less of their incomes - that would be the group that would have to pay for an American welfare state. That won't go over well...
No, American lower and middle class doesn't pay "a lot less of their incomes", it's simply not true.
Also, you must be thinking of your marginal rate being 33% - your federal taxes should be under 20% of your income at $170k, even if filing as single. In Germany, your tax rate would be about 27%.
33% is not a marginal rate, it's an effective tax rate (filing jointly) including payroll taxes which are deducted from my wages, I mentioned it. Also we have a state tax in MA which is also included in 33%.
In any case there are other taxes too (e.g. gas excise, vehicle excise, property tax etc.), so I'm not trying to compare the whole tax burden, that would be too much for HN. But regarding payroll taxes -- they are pretty close even if you consider VAT, certainly not a "lot less", it's a myth propagated by politicians. So the question is: we pay (almost) "welfare state" taxes, where is my part of a welfare state?
All those other taxes exist in Germany too, by the way, and are much higher.
No, I'm not getting "welfare state" benefits, I'm getting a pretty crappy medical service for a price which is waaay higher than in Germany. And if I lose my job I will be paying 2K/month + copays and co-insurances, not mentioning deductibles, unlike in Germany. And God forbids you get into a hospital without insurance, your jaw will drop to the floor when you see the bill.
Have you ever been in the Boston subway? Compare it with almost any city in Europe, hell, even with Montreal. Tell me which welfare state has subways like Boston or NYC? Commuter rail like in Boston? NYC commuter rail is a bit better, but still is not even close to German railways.
And all of the above we get for taxes which are very similar to Germany. No, they are not much lower, it's something with your math. And in absolute value we pay waaay more than in Germany given higher salaries.
Public healthcare is obligatory for all employees except you’re earning more than ~65000€/year or are a civil servant. In which case you are entitled for private health care which might be (or in fact is) more expensive but has more options for treatments and some prioritizing on waiting lists and doctor’s appointments.
Family (husband, wife and children) is always insured for free except they are also employed. Children have to pay seperately after reaching age of 25, and if they still study they pay only a low flatrate.
The rate is always 14.6% of gross income except for very low incomes, in which case the employer pays everything, or very high incomes. There is a cap: everything above 65k is not rated – which seems unfair to me.
The number of millionaires is poor proxy metric for productivity, because of inheritance for instance.
What
???
What % of millionaires inherited vs grew it themselves? Betchya it's like 80% self made lol.
Hardly comparable.
France gdp per capita $43k
If you don't make a lot of money in USA you pay basically no taxes... cars are cheap (or were)...
Big problem is govt being terrible with money and overbudensome with regulations, which reduces supply. Think about how many more doctors/specialists we'd have if systems weren't purposefully setup to be ridiculous.
Look into what residency takes. Not everyone has to be an amazing incredible 80hr week doctor. We could easily double supply of doctors...
I say allow all of this money in politics, you literally cannot stop it. Restrict power instead, it seems obvious..
This is like trying to get govt to invent flight, when instead you just give markets as much power as reasonably possible. Cheap goods and services lead to innovation way better than govt capturing and "redirecting money to their brother's school."
The Soviet Union invented space flight.
If you can stomach it: https://youtu.be/0Xg4Uq1W4L8
Please don't ignore the thousands and thousands of examples of govt being terrible at this, for the handful of somewhat useful examples of shit sticking to the wall. It's still flinging shit
That's mostly just you grandstanding your ideology and not really contributing to a rational discussion.
Did Russia invent rocket propulsion?
How many dozens of millions died because of insane huge govt policies, like redistributing from the successful to the unsuccessful ...
The main one being how would you pay for it?
Basic accounting says the moment population growth stalls you have more outflows than inflows. You can't print money without consequence, and there are other factors that confound these issues further.
Its the ideal of socialism, but the reality is you run into the economic calculation problem. Shortages happen because we live in a world of scarcity, and when they do the system collapses usually causing death (historically).
The main threat to the Norwegian tax system today (in my opinion) is that new industries (fish farming, wind farming) are actively lobbying against georgist tax policies directed at their industries: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and...
For example, taxing your use of transmission capacity would go against georgism: It's possible to make better equipment that transfers bits faster. There are, however, resources that can be hogged on the Internet. For example, domain names: Short (non-trademarked) domain names, e.g. flowers.com, are more valuable than a random string of characters from a lesser known top-level domain, e.g. lrchcu.hat. As there is a limited number of single-word domain names, the owner of the former domain should pay a higher fee or tax for their domain than the owner of the latter.
The difference is that a central miscalculation impacts the entire economy while a decentral miscalculation usually only impacts a small area surrounding that person.
If a group of independent people makes a miscalculation like during the global financial crisis then you end up with the same problem it is just less frequent.
My point was not to complain but to say to the guy that claims that we need a new system with more wealth distribution that those systems already exist. There are a limit though to how high you can tax someone before they stop producing.
I'm sorry but it's just true that a few people are incredible. Elon musk. Steve jobs. These people are basically worth infinity, their potential and vision is extremely useful to humanity.
Sorry a few make it to the NBA, but everyone can try.
Honestly I think you're just jealous.
I started from nothing and have a few million. It's not crazy. There are like 30 million millionaires in the USA.
Do you think the economy is zero sum? Elon musk _took_ money?
And if you need that millions throughout your lifetime, that's fine. But imagine you have so much money to spend that you don't really know how to spend it in your lifetime? That's the problem.
You could get by on like $1,000/mo. Live in a tent, eat rice + protein supplement or whatever, and donate the rest to Africa.
Why don't you do that? If you're posting on this forum: you are in the top 1-5% of the entire world. You have a refrigerator? You should be ashamed and sending that refrigerator to someone who really needs it. You can get by with dry food.
Obviously this is ridiculous. We live in capitalism, which just means _you_ own stuff and control it. If you own a company and that company makes 10,000,000 people happy every day, you're going to make a gorillion dollars. You deserve it, you're literally making that value... ugh..
Then you can do with that whatever you like, just like you can do whatever you like with your refrigerator.
Where's the inherent evil? 10,000,000 people giving $1/day is 365 * $10,000,000 a year in revenue. Where is the evil?! Of course with that money you'll at least put it in the bank, which helps with liquidity, bank runs, funding millions of mortgages, etc... ugh...
ya'll don't appreciate how good things are.
Simply look at all the wealth the rich leave behind when they die ...