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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget VAT

I can spend that in whichever tax jurisdiction I want and the VAT rate might be whatever depending on what one buys. If you want to go that route you'd then also have to adjust for cost/quality of living to stay intellectually honest, which means you'd then have to come up with some statistical consumer basket. It's a stupid idea to even start down that route in what fits into HN comments.

Do you pay VAT on almost anything? It affects how much your actual disposable income is and thus literally how much you can purchase.

Nobody said its going to be trivial to calculate, reality doesn't care about that.

You always have to cost/quality of living if you go that route. Because that's literally what taxes are for. Anyway I don't think it's fair to not include VAT. For every euro you want to utilize(modulo some exceptions) you have to pay it.

3€ fee on every line item for imports says no you cant'.

Yes the exact cost will differ depending on what you buy but that doesn't remove the cost, it just obscures it - which is the point of having so many different taxes.

It's called PPP and yes, it makes Europe look sightly better but it's still behind the US and that's for median household income not tech income.

I've managed staff all over the US and in Europe and have had access to large corporate pay scales across zones. The difference is so significant that CoL is a total rounding error for software developers.

Don't forget that rent is VAT-free

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