[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.