Re:Italy’s teetering banks will be Europe’s next crisis
by lultimouomo on Monday July 11, 2016 @05:15AM
(#12069825)
What you're saying is basically true, but to make a fair comparison you need to consider that in Italy as well you need to add municipal and regional tax (which together are probably around 1%) and particularly that you do pay for you mandatory retirement plan - not with your taxes, but with an additional mandatory withholding that goes from 25% to 35%; plus your employer has a 5% tax on its "profits", but said profits don't consider expenses for your wage, so it's effectively a 5% tax on your wage (this is of course in addition to the regular 26% tax on company profits, from which you can discount employee wages as expenses).
My impression is that the whole system is willingly structured in an overly complicated way, with taxes split between several payers and several taxable bases, so that you cannot know how much of your income are paying.
Also, the taxation is really similar between employees and self-employed workers; it's just that the latter have a marginally better grasp on how much they're paying.
Re:Italy’s teetering banks will be Europe’s next crisis
by vkou on Monday July 11, 2016 @04:59AM
(#12069766)
In the US, you also forgot federal social security tax, (7.65% * 2), Medicare tax (~3%)... And hey, looks like your tax bill just hit 35%. Oh, and feel free to drop another ~$3-10,000 on healthcare.
In fact the actual % is around 35% on 75k euro income, and it doesn't reach 41% until around 200k euro (where the marginal rate is 43%).
In the US, if you earned $50k you'd have a federal income tax around 15%, plus a state income tax (around 5% for California), plus possibly a municipal income tax (around 3% for New York City for example). We're already at 23% and you're getting much worse healthcare than in Italy (even assuming your employer is paying for it, which is not a given) and hardly any retirement plan.
If you're employed the problem is that Italian wages are low (especially in IT), not that taxes are high. Really, taxes in Italy are only high for self-employed people.