When you include state taxes, social security from the employee and employer, then it starts to look like much less of a difference.
When you include health insurance and college education, Americans get much less value.
I do agree with the first half of your comment. American labor laws make it easier to fire which allows employers to take more risk in hiring.
You can have your cake and eat it too. It's called the Danish model, although Denmark itself has an imperfect implementation of the model.
In the Danish model, it's easy to fire people, but the social safety net ensures that the employee doesn't get screwed if it happens. They don't lose their health insurance, EI is generous enough that it has minimal impact on their lifestyle, etc.
And this system of being easy to fire people hasn't exactly resulted in the well paying and plentiful jobs market the way it was promised, most likely due to the bureaucracy and high taxes on businesses, keeping investors away.
So having employees easy to fire is not the key to a good jobs market, but it's having the capital, bureaucracy and tax laws, coupled with the risk taking mentality to convince the rich to invest their wealth in starting new businesses knowing 95% of them will fail and only 5% will succeed, instead of hoarding their wealth away in multi-gernerational real estate thanks to zero inheritance taxes like the wealthy in Austria and Europe in general do.
*: every 1st or 15th of the month is common
[0]: https://www.usp.gv.at/en/mitarbeiter/beendigung-arbeitsverha...
[1]: https://www.usp.gv.at/en/mitarbeiter/beendigung-arbeitsverha...
[2]: https://www.wko.at/service/arbeitsrecht-sozialrecht/Anspruch...
Yes, that's what I meant by being fired, with notice. You thought I meant being fired without notice which is uncommon anywhere in Europe unless the employee did something illegal.
The fact that in Austria your employer can terminate your employment contract anytime with a notice period, and for no reason, is very rare in Europe as it makes employees super vulnerable to loosing their jobs anytime.
In most EU countries, with better employee protections, employers need valid reason and proof to terminate your contract with notice, otherwise they can get sued for wrongful termination and have to pay penalties.
Also, in Austria you can even get fired (with notice) while you're on sick leave, which is pretty barbaric by EU standards.
When you count just the taxes we definitely pay less, especially in places like Texas and Florida. Well, I suppose there's the budget deficit and national debt to consider, though yours aren't exactly great either.
Well, except that there's a middle income trap with social security taxes. Basically, you want to be earning either a fair bit more than the social security cut-off, or to be on welfare. This is a terrible feature of our system.
> When you include health insurance and college education, Americans get much less value.
Honestly I'm starting to believe that our tertiary education system is vastly overvalued and that we can do much better for much less cost. Also, we have state schools that are very good and very cheap (by comparison to private ones anyways). I know people who have done very well in tech without having gone to school or graduated.
As for medical, the only coverage I want is catastrophic, and if I could just just get that then health care would be way cheaper. Health care providers generally have much lower prices when you have no insurance and pay out of pocket.
> I do agree with the first half of your comment. American labor laws make it easier to fire which allows employers to take more risk in hiring.
This is, on the whole, a very very nice feature. We also have better political speech rights than you. And... well, the whole Bill of Rights is a big deal, and European countries mostly don't have anything like it.
I think the US has more freedom of speech (although it's hard to tell without training in constitutional law over 24 official languages (25 if you want to count Welsh, is this EU, Europe, or Council of Europe? Might need to add more…) and a split between common and (multiple subtypes of) civil law), but also I think it's a difference in detail not in kind.
I've had several chronic issues, including cancer surgery and the followon therapies, that I in no way wanted, that stretched out years, ensuring that we (the family) spent our ~$10K deductible for several years running. I've seen this with quite a few other people, as well. It is certain that we would have been bankrupted w/o middling quality corp health insurance. We have also had many $1000s in dental bills, in a year, quite a few times.
The idea that you could self finance these yearly cash flow (up to, what, $100K?) is absurd, unless you are really rich, but you seem to be somewhat price sensitive, so I dunno.
OTOH my sister-in-law makes > $500K/y as an anesthesiologist, and her spouse is a pathologist sadly making somewhat less, so on average the family must be doing great!
Yeah no, my Euro-fruends are aghast at the medical situation here in the US, and we all do view it as a massive effective tax on the unlucky that Europeans more or less don't have to worry about.
We don't have a free market in health care unless you have no coverage, then you can actually negotiate prices. What we have is a monster, and the monster we have today is way way worse than the monster we had in the early 90s.
Not that it helps to say these things. Most of you are either a) bigtech employees with nice healthcare plans and maybe don't care that much (until you're no longer bigtech), or b) fintech employees (same), or c) too young to remember what 80%/20% plans were like back in the day (or never had a non-$WORK plan) and therefore all too willing to demand and/or accept any purported solution that isn't. I hope it helps to say these things here.
Meanwhile we've had a lot of factors pushing up inflation in medical services, so when you add it all up it sucks, but it sucks for all sorts of artificial reasons.
less risk, you used the wrong word. If they can fire easily, they take less risk by hiring. That's more risk for the employee though, you miss the fact that most of the people is not HN, and they don't get paid 6 or 7 figures and don't find a job in days if they really need to.
This is a scoping issue, the action contains the risk because the system has mitigated it.
They do. It's been quantified. There are many states with no income tax.
A 230k salary and corporate health insurance is going to put you ahead of almost every European software shop.
I love Germany and enjoyed my time there, but I choose to work in the states and have the financial security that can only be gained by saving money from a high salary.
Still, I would love to see some friction added to the layoff process in the US. Perhaps larger mandatory severance periods. Make layoffs possible, but not easy.
This neglects any state income or sales tax as well.
- When you contact government offices to ensure you're paying the right taxes on the right things, it's very difficult to get a real answer. Many of them just outright do not know, and rely on "a good-faith effort".
- The situation is so convoluted that their are specialist companies which sell you the idea that they can take care of it for you, yet want you sign a contract that says they're not liable for any problems.
Or you can go to A&E and wait 8 hours, and have it be free.
At least for me, regular medical care needs scheduled out some months, doctors have poor availbility. I get one freebie a year via insurance, everything else is about $50.
For minor injuries, or medical stuff that needs same-day eyes, but not a full emergency department, there is urgent care. You wait as long as it takes, in my area, usually 30-90 minutes, pay $100 and they may or may not be able to help. Minor prescriptions and stitches they can usually do
For major stuff, such as broken bones, heart attack, psychosis, whatever, there is the ER. You wait as long as you wait, and it's about $300 for the initial visit, though this can climb rapidly if you need to stay.
That's about it for your insured options.
Your uninsured options are similar, but more expensive. If you are extremely poor, or old, or both you may have a semi-free option with medicare and medicaid, but that is more complicated than I care to type out.
College education can be had for super cheap in the US via community colleges. Going to an expensive college is a lifestyle choice and I know many people who spend first 2 years in local community colleges and then move to the state college system.
College education in Germany and most other EU members is truly cheap: you have semester fees well under 500 EUR (when they were raised to that in Germany, massive protests pushed them back), plus living costs, no matter where in the country you went to high school or your parents live, no matter whether you’re sticking around at Eastern Bavaria University of Applied Sciences (a relatively new institution serving a traditionally less-prosperous part of the state, with enrollment open to anyone who got an Abitur) or managed to win one of the competitive computer science spots at Technische Universität München: both have semester fees around 100 EUR.
Despite what a famous youtuber like to preach, the US participation is on the US and very few countries that explicitly call for help. And when countries need help, it's not usually the US that they ask first.