You have to pay tax on your savings? What country are you in?

Not the parent comment but in the Netherlands where I live you have to pay tax on your savings once it exceeds about 21K EUR.

The government then makes up that you must be at least getting 4% (up to 9% if you have up to 1M) interest, and it wants 30% of that interest of anything over that 21K EUR limit.

Meanwhile the current interest at banks is anywhere from 0.05% to 1% here (most major banks are around 0.2%).

The way you describe it, it's not tax on savings, it's investment income tax. Almost all countries have it.

As a general principle taxing personal investment income should be taxes at least the same amount as labor income. Taxing labor has more negative externalities than taxing investment income.

I think they're saying that they're being taxed as if they were getting 4% interest on their savings, when in reality they're getting less than 1% because rates are low. So even though it's nominally a tax on interest earned, it's effectively a tax on value of assets held in savings over 21k.

pretty sure you're not paying any tax on the money in your savings account (beyond income tax in the year in which it was earned)

That's valid for some countries, not all.

possibly they mean pay as in losing value to inflation?

It's crazy what people are reading into this comment.

By practically pay, he just means he has a very low interest rate, and possibly some regular account fee's.