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Comment by mfi | Hacker News Reader

In Sweden, for most citizen the tax authority does the tax declaration for you. If you don't want to do any changes (which most people doesn't have to), you simply write a text to them [1].

[1] https://skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/inengli...

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To 1-up a bit, in the UK (and probably several other countries) you usually do nothing at all. The tax is deducted by your employer at time of pay and you just get annual statements that you usually do nothing with. If you are due a refund (e.g. salary went down so your projected yearly income was wrong), you usually get refunded automatically by giro or cheque (or possibly compensatory tax code changes for the next year. Not sure)

How do private shareholders make a profit and thus increase the gdp from that?

by freeing people from wasting money on rentseekers and letting them spend money on more productive things?

To be fair, in Sweden the taxes are also insane. I’d rather have to pay some middleman a paltry sum every year than pay 30% more tax just for the privilege of the government automatically calculating them for me.

Not saying the US shouldn’t do this automatically, I’m merely pointing out it’s not a 1 to 1 comparison.

If you include healthcare, daycare, state pensions, disability insurance, employment insurance etc as a tax (which it is in most cases with more tax) the "insane" amount isn't that insane anymore.

If you make $250k/yr+ in the US all of those problems melt away due to the availability of disposable income.

In the EU you top out at €100-150k.

I say this from experience as a European who's lived on both continents.

Not everyone makes that kind of money :(.

Absolutely true and a valid point, I’m just trying to add some nuance to the conversation. I’ve noticed the North American heavy online bubbles fetishizing Europe in that regard, and the reality is far more grim.

You added some nuance and completely lost most of other nuance.

It's completely evident that the salary differences in the EU/US are not from the convenience of the govt calculating taxes for you, and that's the point you tried to make in your origin post.

On the other hand, you'd make great advertisements for TurboTax.

But this also depends almost entirely on where you live. €100k in the almost any city in Netherlands, France, or Germany is a great income that can support a family with one earner. $250k might only put you in "solidly" middle class if you have to live in SF or NYC. The difference is that the $250k salaries are 99% of the time only widely available in these extreme HCOL cities.

Healthcare for a family of 4 in some parts of the US is absolutely fucking bananas compared to most of Europe. I've seen monthly premiums of $2k+ after the employers part, not to mention the deductible!

Efficiencies from health care competition are illusory when you properly scope it to include paperwork hassles, time hassles, and pressure on provides to skimp.

There basically is no healthcare competition in the US at all regardless of any qualifiers. You often don’t even know how much a procedure will cost you. That fact alone means there is no price competition. Even if in the past there were hospital competition (assuming you’re in the position where you have the time to shop around), hospitals are merging regionally to take care of that.

The US healthcare system is incredibly expensive and ineffective. Americans often like to come up explanations for this status quo but the fact is the system is trash when compared internationally.

This is patently false. 250k+ is readily available in cheaper cities. You just have to work at BigCoSoulStompers.

The US spends more per capita in healthcare than Sweden and Finland combined [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

More or les insane that say, the cost of private health and private education in the US ?

What does the tax rate and prefilling tax forms have to do with each other? The system would work the same with 1% and 99% tax rates too.

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