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Comment by levosmetalo | Hacker News Reader

Maybe higher nominal rates, but USA has much higher tax rates for what you get out of it.

In many parts of Europe tax include social contributions, so you don't pay anything additionaly for haelthcare and retirement. You have free or almost free education up to the university level, subsidized child care, actual unemployment benefits, good transport infrastructure and many such things that you need to pay yourself in the USA. If you want to compare real effective tax rates, just add all these additional expenses to your tax amount and compare it to Europe.

Than again, the chart doesn't include US state tax, so you are really taking into account only a part of US tax rate.

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USA has SOCIAL contributions - FICA, SSI, Medicare. That's retirement, care for disabled and elderly. Our schools ARE free. It's easy to add up my healthcare insurance which isn't much - $250 per month - less than 2% of my income.

The chart INCLUDES NYS tax. Source of that charts:

http://www.businessinsider.com/america-taxes-charts-2013-1

On top of your $250 contribution, your employer will be paying a lot more - average total premiums are $5,615 for a single person or $15,745 for family coverage [1]. And that figure excludes co-pays, which unlike the EU can be huge. Healthcare in the states is just horrifically expensive - 18% of GDP compared to 9% in the EU (or about 11% in the richer countries.) [1,2]

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/health-insurance-cost-statisti... [2] http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/healthspendingineuropefallsfort...

That's true, but the employer is the one paying that.

It reminds me of a job offer I had in the UK, which was 30% lower than the equivalent job in the US. When I visited the site in the UK, the people working there admitted the wages were lower, but stated "You don't have to pay for health insurance."

When I mentioned I only paid $150/month, they seemed shocked.

Of course they were shocked, they pay nothing for equal or even better service and they are covered through the whole EU.

The problem is not if $150/mo is too much or not. The problems are [1] copay and [2] what happens when you don't have a job or money or neither. We all heard the stories "This car ran over me and I'm $100k in debt now" or "I got this $15k bill because I passed out and the ambulance took me to the hospital". That's just plain impossible in the UK or pretty much in any other country in the EU.

That doesn't mean that you can do just fine in regards to health care if your salary is $100k/year in the US.

And I'll give you that in reality it doesn't look cheap when your paying 40% of your salary in taxes, but I'm happy to know that today I'm the one contributing and tomorrow I could be the one receiving treatment "for free" or "paid by others". It's called society.

you pay $150/month if you DON'T use it. If you need more than just a doctor's visit, you have minimums to meet even before the insurance starts paying a part of it

True, but you also make much more in salary and pay much less in taxes.

Are your universities free/cheap?

EDIT:to expand, the school costs are free. But where do the unis stand in terms of costs? For instance, a huge chunk of taxes go to subsidizing free education in a number of EU countries.

They are probably the most expensive thing you will ever pay for outside of your house (and your children's education), and the debt can't be discharged by bankruptcy.

So lets raise taxes to European rates, reduce military spending, and ta da, you can get the same in the US. :P

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