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by snkzxbs 407 days ago
10 minutes is extremely charitable. Make it more like 2 minutes. (And we give the government over half our salary for this level of attention!)
3 comments

Sounds like the american system only your employer takes it out of your check before you even see it
Both your statements are just plainly false (and I’m pretty sure you know it)
They are both correct.

Primary care physicians do not spend more than two minutes diagnosing you in my experience. The diagnosis is always shallow and sometimes wrong because of how rushed the process is.

You pay a third of your salary in taxes, then you pay VAT on everything you buy plus many more taxes for other things such as your property. It amounts to more than half the money you earn.

If I'm ever paying a third of my salary in taxes, I'm positively rolling in money. And, that's not how VAT works.
Yes, that’s how VAT works. You, the end consumer, pay it and the government pockets it.
The third sentence of the Wikipedia article begs to differ. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Value-added_tax&o...

> A value-added tax (VAT or goods and services tax (GST), general consumption tax (GCT)) is a consumption tax that is levied on the value added at each stage of a product's production and distribution. […] VAT is an indirect tax, because the consumer who ultimately bears the burden of the tax is not the entity that pays it.

(Even then, Wikipedia is oversimplifying: "ultimately bears the burden" isn't how economies work.)

What that means is that you don’t pay VAT directly to the government, the business collects it from you and is responsible for giving the money to the government. But yes, the burden is on the end consumer.
> And we give the government over half our salary for this level of attention!

Well that's factually bullshit.