Comment by larnon
11 hours ago
You can't trust a quick google search nowadays for anything. I work in Germany. Any engineer making that much money has to be a senior at a higher position with loads of responsibilities (which means the average is nowhere near), plus living in a city that is considered expensive. Also, half that money goes to taxes. (someone has to pay for the universal healthcare afterall)
> half that money goes to taxes
That is a misguided simplification. Please correct this, before anyone starts to believe it for real.
More precisely, given a salary of 85'000€, about 17'500 (20.5%) goes into income tax and about 16'800 (19.7%) goes into social contributions, though one can reduce the latter by taking a private health insurance*. The remaining 60% (Nettolohn) can be used to purchase things, usually paying 19% of VAT on them (though rent is exempt and food has a lower tax).
So, “half goes away in taxes” is an exaggeration, but I can totally sympathize with the feeling. Especially since the quality of healthcare is declining and the pay-as-you-go pension system is only built to benefit the current generation of pensioners.
* note that, if one is earning less than 77'000€ today or less than 84'150€ in 2027, one is prohibited to switch to a private insurance. One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
I think you should also mention the ~17k Euro social contributions that your employer pays on top, which could otherwise be part of your salary. Then it is actually pretty much 50%
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Don’t forget the mandatory radio broadcast fee every household has to pay even if you don’t read or watch any of those propaganda channels
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Thank you.
I think it is important to be (at least a bit) precise in this debate.
I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc. Discussion about the cost efficiency and fairness of the system are warranted, of course. Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
Since you are accounting all those taxes, including the VAT on the citizen's side, companies only pay the Arbeitgeberanteil (you didn't mention) and the taxes on profit?
>One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
If you mean the existence of two-tier private/public insurance, yes. The two-tier system was abolished in most of Europe for good reason. Either they abolished substitutive private insurance, restricted it, or transformed private insurers into regulated providers of universal basic coverage, e.g. very recently in the Netherlands.
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Having worked in another EU country, I can attest that I paid as much as 56% in taxes, so I believe a guy who says that he works in Germany and pays half in taxes. If you have other data, you are welcome to present it.
If you make 90k in Germany, you pay around 36k to mandatory (varying degrees) insurance/pension plus taxes if you're single. About 19.5k of that are actual taxes. If you're married/have children that total can drop to ~30k and will include health insurance for your entire family unit.
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You however have to admire getting things that wrong in the same paragraph that tells one to not trust what one sees in Google searches. Though I suppose HN comments would show in Google searches... maybe their humor just went over my head.
49% of that money goes to taxes
Sorry, you’re the one who is misguided here.
Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.
Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?
The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.
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That "health care argument" is getting a bit tiring tbh. The US government spends much more than any European country per capita on health care (the US system is simply less efficient), and the chunk of your wage that goes into your health insurance isn't a tax either.
US consumers also have high standards for healthcare.
I interact with a lot of engineers moving from Europe and US and it’s never how US politics portray it. German friends talk about paying for private insurance because the public one is so bad.
How do you define good/bad? People mostly seem to talk about wait time for socialized health care, but where we live in US there's plenty of specialists that you gotta book months ahead of time. When my mom needed a pacemaker it was a 4 month process. My wife's OBGYN is booked a year out - god help you if you miss an appointment. Anyone working in pediatrics look like zombies.
Urgent care clinics have been big in our region. The primary system is obviously overloaded, and 2 of these have popped up in the last 3 years. It's more expensive per visit than our primary physician, but cheaper than an ER visit, which could easily take half a day anyways.
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Complaining about the service quality for public health insurance customers in Germany is pretty much the definition of "first world problem" though. FWIW I never switched over to private insurance even though my income would allow it, also once you get above a certain age you can't switch back and that's when the private insurers really start to rip you off ;)
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Who is making this 'health care argument' you are responding to?
Maybe fully read the comment I'm responding to? The implication is that European countries (and especially Germany) spend an extraordinary amount of tax money on health care and that's why taxes are so high. This is basically wrong from start to finish. You also don't pay half of your wage in taxes in Germany. The chunk that's removed from your gross wage before pay out includes your mandatory employee insurances (health-, pension- and unemployment-insurances), and that's how you end up "losing" about 30% to 45% of your gross salary before pay out (the actual "tax part" is somewhere between 10 and 25% depending on income, marriage status etc...)