Re:Norway: 37% of new vehicles sold in January were electric
by charlesdm on Sunday February 19, 2017 @04:45PM
(#13682193)
Belgium is high tax for people who earn money through labour, but relatively low tax for people with capital / significant wealth.
If you are worth €5m, you can honestly get away with paying almost no tax. If you earn a salary however, you pay ~55%. There is no capital gains tax, which does attract wealthy people to move and spend here, so that's a definite positive.
I would argue we’re a high tax country, that is also a tax haven for some. I think that for most people, the high overall tax rate + employer cost is hurting.
The thing is you obscure it with an unusually high employer social security contribution.
But even looking at "just" income tax and employee contributions on an average salary, Belgium ends up at 32.4% of total employee costs (so these numbers are lower than the percentages paid of gross salary) vs. Norway with 25.2%, Sweden with 18.8% and Denmark at 35.8%.
If you instead of looking at total labour costs, you look at gross wages, Belgium is at 42%, vs Denmark 36%, Norway 28.4%, Sweden 24.7% (for comparison: US: 25.6%). This also places Belgium as the highest taxed OECD country,
Denmark is the extreme opposite of Belgium, in that Denmark has extremely low employer social security contribution and no employee social security contributions (it's baked into the income tax).
[1] http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/taxatio...