[pavlov]

I don’t know where the author grew up, but didn’t he get anything in return for his taxes? I’ve had free healthcare, free college education, free libraries, police and fire departments protecting me, occasional grants, a social security network in case I lost my ability to work... I would never say that “taxes limit my options” because the personal record shows the opposite.

Besides, it’s not about just me: the whole point of taxes is that it gives options to everyone, not just those lucky enough to be born to wealthy parents.

I have a hard time believing that a messaging app founder would spend his money on charities more usefully than the government would spend it on basic services. (Assuming he would donate an amount anywhere close to the tax rate, which he certainly wouldn’t.)

[nickpp]

But wouldn't you have liked to shop around for those free-but-paid-from-your-taxes services? And benefit from competition between providers which drives prices down and quality up?

Government are ultimate monopolies: always getting worse and more expensive.

Maybe you are thinking about a handful of functioning, high quality governments (US, Germany, Nordic States) but I am thinking about the great majority of the governments on the globe (Africa, Asia, E Europe) which provide really crappy, expensive services.

[jon-wood]

No. I really don't want to shop around when I've been hit by a bus and need urgent medical care. I want to know that whatever hospital the paramedics take me to is going to be equipped to handle things, and that I won't be handed a crippling bill afterwards.

I also don't want to shop around for roads, police, fire service, garbage collection, or any number of other things provided by my taxes. I definitely don't want people less well off to go without those things because they couldn't pay. The point of taxes, and particularly progressive taxes, is to ensure everyone has access to services while placing the burden for that on those most able to afford it. That isn't particularly well implemented in many cases, but I strongly believe it should be the goal.

[pavlov]

...competition between providers which drives prices down and quality up?

Does it necessarily? Corporations are looking for profit growth, and the customer will pay for that.

Imagine a service where a public provider is replaced with three private corporations. Superficially there's competition and freedom of choice... But what if the three companies all operate at 80% margin, are constantly squeezing on quality to drive the margin even higher, and they are owned by multinationals that spend enormous amounts on lobbying to prevent new entrants in the market? It's easy to see how both price and quality can be worse in this case than it was with the single public provider.

[fooker]

You can shop around for products. Doesn't work that well for infrastructure.

[addicted]

The whole private charity stuff also creates perverse incentives. The better people who do donate to charity, are the ones who are left worse off, whereas the bad ones who never do, are the people who benefit.

That’s the nice thing about a system of taxation, in that no one is penalized additionally while doing good.

[ekianjo]

> Besides, it’s not about just me: the whole point of taxes is that it gives options to everyone, not just those lucky enough to be born to wealthy parents.

Then how does this thinking fit with the reality of taxes increasing everywhere, year after year? Does that mean that services are getting better? Because you know, it's actually the opposite. It's getting worse: more and more illiteracy in schools, inflation of degrees that don't get you any job, more unemployment (or stagnant at best), healthcare with less and less services... etc.

[pavlov]

...the reality of taxes increasing everywhere, year after year

Can you show data to back this up? To my knowledge, income taxes in all Western countries are lower today than they were in the '50s or '70s.

[candiodari]

Do you check the full cycle ? Ie. if your employer gives you $1, and you use that to give it to Apple (for an app, whatever), how much actually ends up with Apple ?

Let me do the calculation for Belgium for you:

$1 -> First, because yearly the employer has to pay you for 13.92 months, not 12 (end of year bonus thing), we take that out. That's 14% (but you get 20 days 1.5 times paid holidays, and an end of year bonus, which is taxed at a higher rate, but you do get that)

$0.86 -> "patronale bijdragen" (30%) -> $0.6 (even this ignores a few taxes that stem from having employees at all, and assumes there is no union at your workplace. Unions are extra).

$0.6 -> brutto <> netto (depends on total pay because this is a progressive tax, but let's assume you have a normal pay (which gets you into the higest tax bracket and taxed at roughly 40%, let's say 50k euros/year before tax, which is not a particularly large amount) -> $0.36 [1]

$0.36 -> VAT 21% is charged on this -> $0.285

So total tax in .be, for normal workers, is 71.5% (a bit less if you make very little, more if you make more).

This is a strict underestimate, as it assumes you're renting, not owning any real estate, producing zero garbage, not using public transport, harbours or airports, or a car or any kind of motorized vehicle, don't use fuel for anything, not using electricity, gas or water, not ...

Also: you might think this is fair. Everybody pays this, right ? Well, there's one tiny little detail that allows anyone sufficiently rich to evade almost all taxes : capital gains is not taxed in Belgium. Needless to say, this is a hole in the tax code big enough to drive the "bagger 288" through, but only open to the rich (more extreme examples have their own company own things like their house, and they "charge" their own company rent to pay almost entirely with pre-tax money, and you charge their own company rent which is not taxed according to the above calculation). [2]

Aside from cementing the position of the rich, and attracting French comedians, I'm not sure what this accomplishes. [3]

And in case you're wondering about the people who decide all these taxes. Surely they pay those taxes themselves, right ? No [4]. They feel they don't owe the state 71.5%, they feel they owe 12% + VAT, or about 30%, less than half of what their subjects pay)

So no, it's just the normal workers that pay this amount. If you are rich and can get your money paid out to you however you want, then you are taxed at less than 30%, or nothing if you "invest" it all (for instance in that house you live in and rent to yourself). If a politician likes you enough, or needs you, you can get a job that doesn't owe these taxes in government.

Still think it was higher in the 50s ? VAT was 0%, pre-pre-tax taxes (patronale bijdragen) were 0%, and income tax was nominally higher, with the highest bracket at 60% starting pretty high (but again no taxes on income that was packaged in companies). So let's say a well paid consultant in the 50s would have been taxed at something like 45%-50% total.

The argument socialist make to further increase the taxes is, of course, not to tax the rich more. That cannot be discussed in public (and of course has nothing to do with the fact that nearly all leftist politicians are rich landlords that have never once in their life paid tax like this).

The worst of it is, this is correct, but if you tell this to a friend ... they don't believe you ... hell some I have gone through this with them in detail, and they still don't believe me.

They don't believe it to the point that they truly don't understand why construction companies pull crap like having their employees "resident" in Poland. Yes those labourers get less money, but the vast majority of the savings is from not having them subject to the Belgian tax system.

What this pays for ? Social security and pensions. Oh, and total amount the government managed to save for future pension payouts with these taxes ? Zero. 0 comma 0. The amount of elderly is rapidly going up, and taxes will need to rise, at minimum, 100% (from their current level, ie. taxes on wages will need to rise to 140% of pay) if the current level of benefits for the elderly is to be maintained.

[1] https://home.kpmg.com/xx/en/home/insights/2011/12/belgium-in...

[2] http://www.taxbites.be/taxation/content/view/64/42/

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/22/gerard-depardie...

[4] http://www.brusselstimes.com/magazine2/5828/myths-and-truths...

[pavlov]

I won't pretend to know anything about the Belgian tax code or labor laws. But this strikes me as odd way to do the math:

> $1 -> First, because yearly the employer has to pay you for 13.92 months, not 12 (end of year bonus thing), we take that out. That's 14% (but you get 20 days 1.5 times paid holidays, and an end of year bonus, which is taxed at a higher rate, but you do get that)

Why are you subtracting 14% from the employee here? That 1.92 month bonus is money that ends up in the employee's pocket. From the employee's point of view, you should be adding 16% here -- for every $1, the employee actually gets $1.16 when the full year is considered.

If you count bonuses as losses to the employee, that would make for some very unhappy Wall Street bankers (where bonuses can easily exceed yearly pay).

[candiodari]

Because I'm making a specific calculation, from a specific viewpoint. What I'm telling you is what happens when an employer decides to give you 1 euro of their money, how much you get out of that, in terms of what you can give someone else for a good or service, in the (oversimplified) common case. Given that perspective, I feel my calculation is, barring some oversimplifications, correct.

To be exact at the beginning of the calculation I'm calculating euros that your employer spends on you. At the end of the calculation is money you have given to someone else for a good or service that they can actually use for something.

If you want to look at it from an employee's perspective, you're right taxes would look different. In fact, on your "bruto" pay you'll pay income tax, which will come out at around 45%-50% if you're on something around 50k euros/year bruto. And yes, add 14% because of the 13.92 (well, keep in mind that it'll be taxed at the 50% tax rate, and there are additional taxes levied on top of that 50% on that amount, so frankly it'd be safer to assume you get 5-6% on top of your bruto pay actually deposited in your bank account).

I feel like this is a way the government masks how high taxes are, but of course you can look at it however you want. I guarantee, however, that employers budget for your pay in terms of euros they need to pay to anyone to have you on the payroll, and I guarantee that when someone decides on the price to sell you something, they'll consider VAT to not be part of the money they get.

[Maarten88]

Another bug in the calculation is the VAT. Apple will recover most (probably even all) of it on the purchase side of their balance.

[candiodari]

1) this is from the perspective of the employee. Since Apple does what everyone does, they add 21% to the purchase price, therefore the employee buying the final product does bear this cost.

2) what you're saying might be true, but it shouldn't. And it certainly isn't true for non-multinational businesses. They (should) pay 21% on their (revenue - COGS). Of course Apple fakes this (like FB, GOOG, XOM, ...) by including "intellectual property from Apple Bahamas" as a resource all their products are "made from", and it "somehow" eats up all of the profit they would normally have to pay VAT on. But this is tax avoidance/abuse, and not the normal case. Frankly, this should be illegal, but that's impossible due to international treaties.

So perhaps you could say that since Apple is a big multinational it is a bad example as that makes it much more complex. But it doesn't change how taxes work for everyday purchases.

Make it "a locally made can of beer" and none of this applies at all.

[baybal2]

A very insightful comment you made!

>but again no taxes on income that was packaged in companies

Glad that you noted that. I feel that packaging your own income in shell companies is very common across the Western world

[piva00]

I don't think you can be that expansive about your personal experience with taxes, it's very dependent on where you live and it really seems you don't live in the same place where I do so please contextualise where your argument comes from and add some data to base it on.

[Vinnl]

> Does that mean that services are getting better?

One part of it is that there's more of it: more elderly people that require and receive care.

[thriftwy]

Being 32, I fail to understand how it benefits my bottom line.

[Vinnl]

The theory is that you both a) have relatives/other people that you care about that benefit from this, and b) that you will benefit from it when it's your turn to live even longer.

Of course, it's yet to be seen how well b) will play out in practice.

[thriftwy]

Maybe they do benefit from this. I fail to see how it converts into an obligation for me.

I care about X. X would like to recieve money backed by my payments. Does that mean I owe them those payments?

How well do Ponzi schemes play out in practice?

[Vinnl]

There is no inherent obligation. Where I'm from, though, we've voted for governments that make it one.

[ekianjo]

We already know that b) is not going to work in practice, because of the population curve. So, there's that. Why should you pay for something you will never get yourself?

[Vinnl]

Because of a), and because we don't have an alternative for b) yet, but whatever we might come up with might be bootstrapped with these payments.