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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Belgium’s tax burden is close to California, they just don’t split it up into a bunch of different categories. However, look at how much a self employed single person retains from their income when doing to comparison and the situation is more clear.

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I am a self-employed freelancer and I have done all fiscal optimization possible in BE and my effective tax burden is 37%.

From what I find in Google about CA's total optimized tax burden for a one-man freelance company it is about 28%. And a lot more buying power too probably, but that is hard to compare in.

Of course this is personal income from labour via one-man companies ("net take-home"). This does not take into account VAT, capital gains taxes, etc.

There’s a ton of different ways to do these kinds of comparisons, but I’m unsure how you could end up with a single number here:

> CA's total optimized tax burden for a one-man freelance company it is about 28%

CA’s tax burden varies wildly based on a host of factors. However the simple calculation for a freelancer filing as a single person making 50k = 24.6%, 100k = 32%, 150k = 36.5%, 300k = 40% which some people actually pay. https://www.upwork.com/tools/freelance-tax-calculator

According to that calculator my CA tax burden ratio would be 29.7% so seems the websites I read were not far off the mark.

Ahh ok that makes sense. Comparing vs equal income in nominal or PPP dollars is reasonable though it’s going to make CA look better vs income percentile.

Healthcare costs, VAT vs sales tax, and various deductions definitely matter in practice but further muddle the comparison.

The percentage of amount paid->amount received is not the appropriate number as it excludes the (very different!) tax rates on various kinds of consumption, however, it is reasonably straightforward to end up with a single number for the purposes of comparison - metrics like the total of all taxes/tarrifs/fees/etc vs total of all production(GDP).

Taxes vs GDP runs into the issue of ownership of assets not being limited to a single country. When Walmart/Amazon/etc pays taxes and issues a dividend some of that money is diverted from US stockholders but ~40% is diverted from foreign entities.

It’s an inherent advantage of corporate taxes over income taxes, you simply get more resources from the same burden on your citizens.

> This does not take into account VAT

For the viewers at home that is 6% on food, and now electricity (how kind daddy govt), and 21% on everything else. So this tax burden is in fact higher.

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