[jstummbillig]

Because labor protection costs money. If you get something from that, that's net boosting your economy, you have no problem. If not, you get social cohesion, at a price.

Somebody is paying that price. If it's companies they are disincentivized to employ people in your market. If companies go somewhere else to employ people, jobs disappear from your market. If the jobs disappear, so does the money.

[knowledge-clay]

> Because labor protection costs money

Labor protection does not "cost money". It is a limit on the degree to which workers can be exploited.

[dzhiurgis]

Sorry but 50% tax rate is exploitation. Especially so how inefficient government spending is.

[knowledge-clay]

European labor regulation and European tax rates have nothing to do with each other. The former is about restrictions on how employers can treat employees. The latter is about funding a robust welfare state. For what it's worth, both are good.

[disgruntledphd2]

I live in Europe and pay 52% marginal. I considered moving to California and it turned out that I'd be paying about 50% marginal. So not sure it makes that much difference.

[seec]

Even if this is completely correct, you would be paid more in California, right? Or at the very least have better purchasing power. That would come at the cost of security of course, but considering the state of EU governments it's no clear how long that security will last really...

[disgruntledphd2]

> Even if this is completely correct, you would be paid more in California, right?

Correct, at the time it was about a 50% increase. However, given my food & shelter costs it would have ended up being more expensive for me to live in California.

The post I replied to was about high levels of taxation, which exist in the US also (the treatment of capital gains would have been much more favourable to me).

[Muromec]

Labor protection costs money the same way monopolies cost money. You can have a strong cartel on the one side of the labor market or another, but there is a backed-in assumption that cartel of workers harms the economy more than a cartel of employers. This coming from a employers mouth is just negotiation tactics, nothing more.

>If companies go somewhere else to employ people, jobs disappear from your market.

Does this actually happen anywhere in the usual suspect countries? Doesn't seem to be. Quite the opposite -- they all import workers, because the actual pain point right now is pension fund deficit with the ration of retired to working being skewed.

[seec]

Yes that's the point. They import cheap labor ready to take jobs at lower prices than the native population because they don't have to live in the same social circles. It's almost the same as delocalization, it's a form of social dumping and all of this is possible because governments are both incompetent and addicted to the tax money. The pension deficit is the result of an overly socialized system where governments promised unrealistic benefits to a generation who fully profit from it and now let their children pay for it.

This is the result of relying too much on politics. If parents where to ask their children to pay for their expensive retirement benefits directly, most who tell them to fuck off, rightfully so. But since politicians have placed a level of indirection in between, it's not the responsibility of anyone yet everyone pays for it.

Socialist systems have a way of self-destructing after a while because nobody ends up being accountable for anything. Currently the politicians are good scapegoats but really the people who put those politicians in place bear as much responsibility.

If it had been about their own money, things wouldn't have turned out this way. Funnily enough since most people don't trust governments that much, they have double dipped, saving on top of retirement benefits and "investing" in real estate that they now rent at a high price to their children. This has created an obscenely well-off generation, that is now voting for immigration in order to keep their obscene retirement benefits, furthermore fucking their children.

[general1465]

Not mangling your workers is for free.