[HamsterDan]

It's a monstrous disincentive to increased productivity. If you're a smart, ambitious person who wants to work hard and advance your lot in life, are you really going to stay in Spain knowing that the government is going to take half of everything incremental thing you do?

This is basically inviting your best and brightest to move to the US and other low tax countries.

[phil21]

I looked into this a long time ago, it’s only gotten “worse” since then as far as I know.

Assuming your money comes via income and you are not doing anything exceptional to optimize taxes, you are around that 50% or so rate on incremental income nearly anywhere you’d be able to make such incomes in the western world. Normalize for things like health insurance and it’s really not worth even considering a move for tax purposes in most cases.

The US is known as low taxes, low services - but it’s really within about 5% for high earning professional workers compared to even most social democracies. It’s a decidedly high tax low services place to live.

The largest difference in taxes in the US vs rest of the developed world seems to be the high tax brackets start much earlier on the income scale. It’s much better (for taxes at least) to be in the US as a median wage earner and it’s usually not remotely close.

Where things decouple is how capital and other forms of investment income are treated. That gets too complicated for me to understand, but it’s clear to me that a charitable take would be tax code has not kept up with how the wealthy increasingly earn their income.

[disgruntledphd2]

> This is basically inviting your best and brightest to move to the US and other low tax countries.

If you're in tech, you'll want to move to California, where you'll end up paying around 50% marginal, which is much the same as lots of Western Europe. So yeah, you'll make more money but you won't get significantly lower tax rates.

[diggan]

> If you're a smart, ambitious person who wants to work hard and advance your lot in life, are you really going to stay in Spain knowing that the government is going to take half of everything incremental thing you do?

I'm smart (anecdotal, but still) and ambitious, and I moved to Spain, and I'm planning to stay here, yeah. Yes, I'm OK with the government taking the excess profits us "rich" people earn so others who cannot work still can survive and even get health-care, like the rest of us.

> This is basically inviting your best and brightest to move to the US and other low tax countries.

If that leads to all the soulless money-chasers move to the US, then that sounds like a positive to me. I prefer a society where everyone gets equal chance and a good life, regardless of income, and the ones who want to ruin that can continue to build their utopia in the US.

[const_cast]

> This is basically inviting your best and brightest to move to the US and other low tax countries.

The US is not a "low tax" country, it's just underdeveloped in social services. Which might give the impression the tax rate is low, but it's not - it's very high. Not only are you going to be paying income tax within 10% that of a western European nation, but you also have lots and lots of invisible taxes.

For example, did you know that about 30% of all compensation in the US goes just to providing health insurance and other benefits to employees? One of the downsides of having an underdeveloped health sector is that it's quite expensive.

Or, how about the fact that the average American spends 15% of their gross income just on transportation cost? Turns out having all that underdeveloped transit infrastructure isn't free. We pay for that.