[ceejayoz]

> I live in Germany and I pay almost 50% of my income in income tax and social tax.

I live in the US and pay less raw tax than that, for sure.

But I reported $49k in medical expenses (premiums, deductible, copays, stuff they won't cover) last year on my taxes, and I've got two kids going to college in a year, which may cost $10-40k/year for each.

I'd rather your trade-off.

[selfmodruntime]

My trade-off is not seeing a specialist for 6 months and more while paying 10k healthcare premiums a year for state mandated healthcare. Dermatologists in my city only take privately insured patients or self-paying patients. So I pay 300 Eur a visit anyway. On a third of a US software engineer's salary. I don't qualify for private insurance so im OOL.

[ceejayoz]

I’m in the US. We have six month waits for specialists too. And we pay almost twice what y’all pay per capita. Inclusive of both private and public spend.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Average_annual_healt...

[hparadiz]

You forget that the college expense is temporary while the taxes are forever. And Germany still makes you get private insurance for medical. A single year of taxes in Germany based on my current American income would pay for all of that you just said. So then my question for you is. What were you doing with your money in those other years? I hope it was saving it. Because otherwise I'm gonna eye roll hard at you wanting to increase taxes on everyone just to get a small cut in how much you pay during one fiscal year. Seems silly.

[ceejayoz]

> You forget that the college expense is temporary while the taxes are forever.

I see you're unfamiliar with American student loans.

> And Germany still makes you get private insurance for medical.

We spend about double what you do for healthcare, inclusive of both private and public spending. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expendit...

> What were you doing with your money in those other years?

An enormous amount of it has been going to healthcare for about twenty years now. This wasn't our first year of such costs.

[hparadiz]

I am very familiar with American student loans. I paid my 40k off in about 11 months by keeping my spending down that year. It was easy. I don't want to pay 15% of my income forever just because you can't budget. Also frankly your kids should be paying their own way through college. That's a nice gift you're giving them but it's 100% a discretionary expense and is basically you saying "I have so much money I can simply gift it to my kids". Shit I wish I had that.

[ceejayoz]

> That's a nice gift you're giving them…

I never said I was - I'll certainly try to help where I can. I don't have that kind of money; see aforementioned healthcare costs! They're gonna need loans, it's probably gonna be quite a bit more than $40k, and I'm pretty dubious in the current job market that they're gonna have $40k in discretional annual income on the other end.

> I don't want to pay 15% of my income forever just because you can't budget.

And I don't want to go bankrupt from ever-rising medical costs, but here we are.