@sjw @matrix @sjw @matrix I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but in the UK £12,570 and below is tax free, anything above up to £50,270 is then taxed at 20%.
If you earn £50,271 - £150,000 then your tax is 20% for everything 12,570-50,270, then everything above that then gets taxed at 40%
And anything over 150k is then taxed at 45% (so as it's a band system, not everything is 45%, if you lean £160k, only 10k of it is taxed at 45%) https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
So a bit off from your 60-70%.
@Haych @sjw That doesn't seem that high.
Every percentage is from rough income (pretax).
Here in Czechia income tax is 15% (income over 48x of national average is 23% (it used to be called solidarity tax lmao)).
Health insurance is 13.5% for self-employed, for employees 9% is paid by the employer and 4.5% by the employee.
Pension is included in social insurance, which is 6% paid by the employee, 24.5% by employer, 29.2% for self-employed.
Tax from acquiring property got canceled, but property tax is still here and it's calculated from property size, type and location (higher population region = higher tax).
Plus you have VAT which depends on items.
I hope I got things correctly.
However I don't know what the real percentage people here pay to the state is, because you can write off various things.
@matrix @sjw @matrix @sjw National Insurance is 2%, pension is /optional/, and your employer has to pay at least 3%, and that's a personal private pension not with the government so not fair to include that.
Government pensions are covered by how many years you paid National Insurance at 2%
We don't have property tax but we have stamp duty but that's only when you buy a house over £250k, buy a house that's cheaper or rent forever and it's 0%.
So Tax at 20% for most people, NI at 2%, we're at 22%. Even if you chose to pay pension most people default to 3% (with work matching 3%) so that's 25% total.
Sure we do pay VAT on things, but the US has sales Tax, the difference is ours is country level not state level.