[KGIII]

I can't find any OECD data that says Germany is the second highest taxed country in the world. The closest I can find is the tax as a percentage of GDP and, in that listing, they are 13th.

I'm interested in reading more/a list of the highest taxed nations as a way to easily counter the claim that the US is the highest taxed. Do you have a link/citation, so that I can verify that?

[rmoriz]

Check how much unmarried singles have to pay.

http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLE_I6

Germany 39%

USA 26%

The early time in life when you build the foundation for your financial freedom. In Germany you won’t get the chance. You will be conditioned to pay into all the nice, costly systems that mathematically will fail due to shrinking population and longer life spans (medical/care costs) long time before you will be able to get „something back“

[KGIII]

Hmm... I'm not sure 'unmarried singles' equates to 'secind highest taxed in the world.' That's a rather small category? As a percent of GDP, it is pretty far down the list of the countries they include.

We here in the US enjoy very, very low taxation. What is strikingly odd, to me, is that many of my fellow citizens believe we are taxed at comparably high rates.

At any rate, I'm still not able to find anything that puts Germany at the top, even for corporate/business taxes. It looks like some of the Scandinavian countries are pretty find of taxation, though they do enjoy quite a few benefits from that system.

Edited to clear up some verbiage.

[rmoriz]

Sort the table. Germany is second.

[KGIII]

Yes, I see that. It's second in a very narrow category that I'm not sure equates to 'the entire world' when talking about general taxation. The OP didn't state that "German single people are taxed at the second highest rate in the entire world."

So, while it's interesting, that's not really the same as what the OP suggested.

[rmoriz]

It is, as I pointed out: Everyone starts as single, unmarried person with 0 children. It's the time in your life when you make the big decisions, take high risks, maybe get high returns.

1. If you cannot save enough money to buy a condo, you will probably run into financial problems once/if you marry and grow your family. It's easy as that. Having children ist one of the top reasons to become poor in Germany. You add additional costs and risks to your life. Sure you pay much less taxes then but you already have a tight income situation (child care is expensive).

2. In the US the usual wages in IT are much higher. Let's say 75-150.000. Minus 26% taxes. You can easily save a lot of money in 5-10 years if you live a modest lifestyle. Compound interest/index ETF savings plan. Simple math.

[jaclaz]

Hmmm, it is a completely different situation, normally in the US someone that is in IT also has a huge college/university debt that he/she should re-pay.

And besides - probably not so relevant when you are young and fit - somehow you have to consider the social assistance (healthcare before anything else) that Germany (or most EU countries) offers to their citizens (compared to the US provided ones, which is - I believe - 0 or nearly 0).

Before or later you won't probably be a single, unmarried person with 0 children, and I believe that "social" states such as Germany offer a number of advantages when it comes to children's costs, so a good "tactic" would be:

1) be born in Germany

2) study there (for free or almost free)

3) as soon as you are fit to earn a decent wage, emigrate somehow to the US getting a highly paid job in IT

4) stay there for ten years or so, living modestly so that you can maximize your savings

5) when the time comes for marriage, go back to Germany (hopefully in the meantime you will have enough experience as to find easily a well paid IT job there too)

6) get the "social" provisions and benefits that Germany offers you and your family (at the cost of a higher than US taxation level)

[kylecordes]

I think the general notion on such lists is that you can think of numerous different ways to rate how highly taxed in nation is. You can therefore come up with many different lists that have different countries in the top few positions. Simply pulling out a well-chosen list allows one to make the claim that a country to be criticized is the highest taxed.

I'd also like to see such a list, but with several different measures of highly taxed, and some plausibly unbiased attempt to aggregate them together. I am curious how the overall taxation compares among countries.

[KGIII]

If you're in the US, you probably pay a much lower percentage than you do in many other nations. That much I can establish.

Wikipedia has some good tables but, like you suggest, compiling that data is not that easy due to biases. There are also different names for the taxes, different categories, differences in reporting, etc... About all I can conclude is that I don't pay much, compared to what I'd pay elsewhere, in taxes.

I actually don't mind paying taxes. I do mind how the money is spent, but that veers into a digression and politics. So, I'll skip that for today.

[setr]

Wouldn't the correct thing be to find some list that just tracks the final tax to each individual, averaged and bucketed over some range of income, ignoring individual reasons for taxes?

It doesn't immediately seem that difficult for a group to gather, if they're interested in declaring average tax by country; and it seems like an interesting enough question that someone should have done it by now

[kafkaesq]

I can't find any OECD data that says Germany is the second highest taxed country in the world.

They got it from the same place they found out they found that Germany also had "more than 300000 laws and rules for everything". You know, the "it feels like it must be so, therefore it might as well be so" place.

[KGIII]

Still very strange that they even claimed the citation came from a very specific source. I'm mostly just curious, at this point.

Also, if we count all the various regulations, even at just the Federal level, I'm pretty sure that '300000' is not actually a big number. The US tax code is larger than that.

But, hey! It looks like a big scary number. So, there's that.