Comment by drdexebtjl
4 hours ago
This is very misleading. My salary in Brazil is on the very top end (with most of my income in the 27.5% bracket), and my average effective income tax rate in the last 5 years has been about 16%.
I'm not doing anything creative accounting-wise, I just max out my contributions to retirement accounts (PGBL) and get the correct tax deductions for all medical and education expenses.
We do have high import tariffs for individuals, and especially for consumer goods, as it's been pointed out in a different comment.
This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. But if you don't, you'll find that individuals don't really pay that much compared to other countries.
> This is very misleading.
It's your comment that's misleading. I was trying to account for the numberless taxes that exist and get applied to every single transaction. You zeroed in on income taxes then stacked some deductions on top.
> tax deductions
Discounting deductions from the nominal tax rate doesn't change the fact those taxes are high, nor does it change the fact you max out your tax bracket at middle class incomes.
Deductions are actually the bare minimum. If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights. Not deducting these expenses would be robbery. The fact most brazilians have plenty of deductions at their disposal is only evidence of how absurdly tax inefficient this country is.
These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax.
Finally, other countries no doubt have deductions too. I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison.
> This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism.
What a dismissive comment.
US government just banned Fable for foreign peasants like us. If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now.
If you think having some degree of sovereignty over our computing is "worshipping consumerism", then I don't know what to say to you.
Europe is currently fighting tooth and nail to develop some technological independence. China is creating Manhattan projects to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing and kick them out of their supply chains. If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind.
Brazil taxes foreign products in order to "protect local industry", then it taxes the local industry as well, which means pretty much nothing higher up in the value chain gets made here. Brazilian efforts at creating national computer technology date back to the military dictatorship, to the import substitution policies. The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact. What have we been doing since then? Nothing. Don't have our own industries, and we can't really buy the products produced by other nations either. This is why people leave: Brazil combines the worst of both worlds.