I have the feeling this is generally true in the other conservative parts of the EU as well. Eyes are very much on Estonia in the EU for this reason. It's all very sluggish, but the wheels are starting to turn, I think.

The Estonia e-residency is very good for ‘nomads’ ; if you travel a lot (say you do not reside in one country 6 months + 1 days and (but this is debatable somehow) are not in a country more than 60 days continues, you can have a company in Estonia and declare tax for that company there. Which is to say, no tax until you take money out. If you don’t travel like that it is far more complex.

They try to make everything anti-cheat, but in the end cheaters cheat anyway, and in the process they make everything slow and painful.

I'm interested in reading more/a list of the highest taxed nations as a way to easily counter the claim that the US is the highest taxed. Do you have a link/citation, so that I can verify that?

http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLE_I6

Germany 39%

USA 26%

The early time in life when you build the foundation for your financial freedom. In Germany you won’t get the chance. You will be conditioned to pay into all the nice, costly systems that mathematically will fail due to shrinking population and longer life spans (medical/care costs) long time before you will be able to get „something back“

We here in the US enjoy very, very low taxation. What is strikingly odd, to me, is that many of my fellow citizens believe we are taxed at comparably high rates.

At any rate, I'm still not able to find anything that puts Germany at the top, even for corporate/business taxes. It looks like some of the Scandinavian countries are pretty find of taxation, though they do enjoy quite a few benefits from that system.

Edited to clear up some verbiage.

So, while it's interesting, that's not really the same as what the OP suggested.

1. If you cannot save enough money to buy a condo, you will probably run into financial problems once/if you marry and grow your family. It's easy as that. Having children ist one of the top reasons to become poor in Germany. You add additional costs and risks to your life. Sure you pay much less taxes then but you already have a tight income situation (child care is expensive).

2. In the US the usual wages in IT are much higher. Let's say 75-150.000. Minus 26% taxes. You can easily save a lot of money in 5-10 years if you live a modest lifestyle. Compound interest/index ETF savings plan. Simple math.

And besides - probably not so relevant when you are young and fit - somehow you have to consider the social assistance (healthcare before anything else) that Germany (or most EU countries) offers to their citizens (compared to the US provided ones, which is - I believe - 0 or nearly 0).

Before or later you won't probably be a single, unmarried person with 0 children, and I believe that "social" states such as Germany offer a number of advantages when it comes to children's costs, so a good "tactic" would be:

1) be born in Germany

2) study there (for free or almost free)

3) as soon as you are fit to earn a decent wage, emigrate somehow to the US getting a highly paid job in IT

4) stay there for ten years or so, living modestly so that you can maximize your savings

5) when the time comes for marriage, go back to Germany (hopefully in the meantime you will have enough experience as to find easily a well paid IT job there too)

6) get the "social" provisions and benefits that Germany offers you and your family (at the cost of a higher than US taxation level)

I'd also like to see such a list, but with several different measures of highly taxed, and some plausibly unbiased attempt to aggregate them together. I am curious how the overall taxation compares among countries.

Wikipedia has some good tables but, like you suggest, compiling that data is not that easy due to biases. There are also different names for the taxes, different categories, differences in reporting, etc... About all I can conclude is that I don't pay much, compared to what I'd pay elsewhere, in taxes.

I actually don't mind paying taxes. I do mind how the money is spent, but that veers into a digression and politics. So, I'll skip that for today.

It doesn't immediately seem that difficult for a group to gather, if they're interested in declaring average tax by country; and it seems like an interesting enough question that someone should have done it by now

They got it from the same place they found out they found that Germany also had "more than 300000 laws and rules for everything". You know, the "it feels like it must be so, therefore it might as well be so" place.

Also, if we count all the various regulations, even at just the Federal level, I'm pretty sure that '300000' is not actually a big number. The US tax code is larger than that.

But, hey! It looks like a big scary number. So, there's that.

Health insurance: if you're freelance, your health insurance is preferably private (cheaper) and you're free to cancel it if you please.

Capital gains: is for speculations, can choose to "be a saver not a gambler".

Church tax: is for church members, don't join.

Gewerbesteuer: is for LLC/Ltd/GmbH/UG etc --- not for freelancers/Freiberufler

Pflege: never joined that in my whole life. Seems to be optional then.

Rundfunk: this becomes an issue when you register as a resident or fail to deregister as a resident. Now, not being registered as a resident while residing qualifies as "offense"/"misdemeanor" (Ordnungswidrigkeit), not as a crime, last I checked =) (I registered though, when I moved back here after years abroad. Though in retrospect, I have no idea why I did --- for someone who never makes it to the voting booth, all it gives you is GEZ hassles.)

No, having health insurance has been mandatory in Germany since 2007. You're free to switch providers, or go from private to public insurance, but you can't just cancel it and go without insurance.

Church tax is automatically deducted with the other taxes. It's collected alongside other taxes and you don't have to file separately for this.

The corporate tax code is certainly not the easiest but common for most countries of the world.

I'd totally agree that German taxes are complicated but the number of taxes to pay says nothing about the complexity. Neither does it say anything about digitisation.

Also, Rundfunkbeitrag, Krankenversicherung and Pflegeveraicherung aren't taxes.

Nope. Not even in the EU. Not even close. Where does this myth come from? Is it that it has passed the UK per capita?

I mean, there are loads of nice things about Germany, and economic strength is one, but that's a wild exaggeration.

Per-capita in the EU is skewed by a fair number of very small but very very rich countries. Luxembourg, the leader, being a tax haven and a population of half a million (!!) does not make it the healthiest and best economy.

Germany is certainly not the richest country in Europe but it has been one of the most successful when measured vs. 15 years ago. But that was achieved mainly by keeping wages low so that Germans, while usually living comfortably and not threatened by unemployment, have much less wealth than people in the UK or US.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/22/greece...

But it's probably mostly network effects. The US has an extremely complex tax code and SV is one of the most expensive places to live. It still remains a favourite among founders.

Germany sure is nice country to live in, but it benefits a lot at the expense of others.

Basically everybody with more than a minimum wage job in the US needs this kind of help, and regulatory (actually congressional) capture by the two giants Intuit and H&R Block mean that any efforts to fix this are squelched.

As for Estonia.. here's a golden ticket to make international internet income + low cost of living. Not to mention Talinn is charming.

I forget the exact details, but again IIRC it was well under 100 € / month (40?, 60?) and unmetered.

I was jealous.

Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but it fell into my mental category of "Europeans now getting a lot more and better connectivity for a lot less".

Contrasted with a decade or two earlier, when telecom prices over there seemed to be quite relatively high (compared to the U.S.).

P.S. Pinged him to check the details.

The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information, so you can't get a loan on your neighbours name just because you caught a glimpse of his passport.

That's precisely the issue with SSN.

If you know the SSN and a few other personal details (like address and phone number), you are assumed to be that person, and can get access to their accounts and sign up for credit cards or loans over the phone or internet.

But every company that uses SSN to authenticate you also must store the SSN, it will be visible to their employees, and recently SSNs, addresses and many other details of most adult Americans got leaked in the Equifax hack.

If this sounds completely crazy and insecure, it is. An ID number should not be a password, it should be a public primary key. And some other method should be used to actually authenticate the person - one that does not ever require handing it over in plaintext.

When someone wants a loan or anything like that then we have to show our real ID card or passport, or authenticate on the web with our smartcard and pin. So nobody can do stuff that's possible in the us - apply for credit cards and loans without authenticating properly.

It identifies someone but it doesn't authentify him. Just like shireboy is your identity but it doesn't authentify you.

FFS - I live and only have ever worked in Silicon Valley and I couldn't even get freaking DSL for five years after it was invented in San Jose!

If nothing else, it's a shining example of what can be achieved when a collective effort is put into modernizing digital infrastructure, i.e. putting a little -- otherwise [economically] unremarkable -- baltic country on the economic map. Moreover, this comes at a time during which there is much discussion of the US (and several European countries') aging infrastructures, and in which the economic opportunity of modernizing them is being scrutinized.

Granted, this kind of transformation may or may not be possible elsewhere, but to brush it aside as "uninteresting" is to suggest a lack of intellectual curiosity.

What's going on is larger counties made the jump sooner so small countries have many examples to learn from.

  So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT

Remember, things like local tax laws are not going to simply reflect some other country's rules 100% of the time.

One can look at the populations in circa 1300 and extrapolate from that. Without going into details - the baltic coast had it's own catholic/pagan populations with trade ties to hanseatic cities, and those populations are the basis for current nation states.

Russia, with it's slavic culture strongly tied to the greek orthodox church was a bit further to east.

See for example

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_Russi...

and other wikipedia pages on the baltic states.

None of this have much to do with the current tech scene, though :)

Compared to Denmark or Norway where virtually everyone (from kids to elderly people) actually speak decent English, none of the Baltic countries have 'exceptional English'.

"Even doctors may not have good English" -- in Paris I'm happy to find one that will speak English at all. Do not underestimate how unwilling or afraid to speak English a lot of people are even in places like Paris and Berlin.

Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian (which is non indo european language) have virtually no non-native speakers and large amounts of the Russian born citizens (and aliens) may not speak the language, rendering English a good choice to obtain information. Having tiny user base forces the case compared to France, Germany or Italy (imo worse than both France/Germany).

For instance movies at the theater (and largely on the TV) have no dubbing unless they are targeted to kids who are unable to read.

Russia doesn't seem very limited to me.

"Russia-China Bilateral Trade Up 30% In Q1 2017" [0]

"Russia upgraded to top rank in world wheat exports in 2017-18" [1]

"In Moscow, Saudi king slams Iran, signs billion dollar defense, energy deals" [2]

"King Salman and Putin Deals Leave the U.S. Out in the Cold" [3]

"Russia, world's 2nd-biggest arms seller, wants to expand its arms sales abroad" [4]

[0] https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russia-china-bilateral-...

[1] http://www.agrimoney.com/news/russia-upgraded-to-top-rank-in...

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-moscow-saudi-king-slams-ira...

[3] https://www.rand.org/blog/2017/10/king-salman-and-putin-deal...

[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-russia-poised-to-expand-it...

Check out another one I found -- "Russia US Trade up 25% in 2017"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2017/04/22/russia-u-...

There no doubt that Russia is still a major player in trade, in fact economists see it as one of the countries with the most potential for development in BRIC (brasil russia india china).

Unfortunately, the way the strata of government and society are has left the population to stagnate in terms of their well being and they are missing the opportunities in new-age, non-oligarchical industries - Russia is held back by its antiquated social structures and lacks incentive to change.

But ultimately the biggest culprit is probably the major political, economic and cultural hangovers from over a century of political instability.

Yet, but the prime majority of all that wonderful digital cornucopia is being developed by underfed and underpaid devs with level of technical comprehension comparable to people called "jquery monkeys" in the West. By the time most of them reach late twenties, more experienced ones will move on to become professional devs abroad, another will, sadly, join the socioeconomic construct/caste of "going to nowhere 30 somethings." You guys in the West complain about age discrimination and skill obsolescence only by the time you hit forties, fifties, if not sixties, but here people hit the same stage much earlier. Companies do not pay for skill even 1/10th of what an American Dotcom would.

What makes a seeming difference in the level of quality is that experienced tech people are found more evenly distributed than in US where Dotcoms and well funded companies vacuum significant portion of any much senior developers on the job market, or in China where Alibaba and Tencent literally employ double digit of all tech workforce and almost all real talent. Here, the fact that a software developer is just yet another "nothing special" white collar occupation somehow, counterintuitively brings some benefit.

I make $40k after tax, in Russia, employed locally, and while that doesn't sound like much to an American ear, I've bought my apartment for $90k a year before. I seriously doubt anyone is going to pay me $400k before tax in the US as you suggested. I'm 32 by the way. And I never work more than 40 hr/week.

I don't see how you can underpay a dev in Russia. Maybe you can by hiring in really small and depressive towns? Or promising rocket science job?

That makes you a rather expensive employee if the company hiring you actually pays your pension contributions, EI, medical bills, and other quasi-tax charges (which are much higher than in the West.)

24k a year is what a good grad can expect in a company that pays taxes in full. The full cost of employing such a guy will be right about $40k

It's frequent nowdays to be cited your salary before 13% tax.

They had an insane monarchy that delayed industrialization, missed out on the middle class development and went through a scorched earth total war and communist regime.

It’s a nation of contrast and paradox. Russia is a lot like the US in many ways.

That actually isn't true. Russian monarchy wasn't late to industrialize, and around half of industrial success claimed by USSR is rooted before 1917. For example, Donbass was already a thing back then.

The other half was built by the USA.

It was decades behind the UK and others. That’s not to say there was no industry, but over half of output was peasant agriculture circa 1900, and the old methods were unable to adequately feed the nation.

Soviet period is when mass starvations happened. And not only during wars.

Starship reminds me of Better Place, the car battery swap company out of Israel. Too much PR, too many demos spread around the world, not enough profitable deployment. It looks like they're trying to make enough noise to be acquired by Amazon and exit, rather than actually providing a service that gets used.

"It looks like they're trying to make enough noise to be acquired by Amazon and exit, rather than actually providing a service that gets used."

I could not agree more.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0YtPjQ5WCE

Initially, all the extra money would go to the startup, but with competition, it's the consumers that would save. If it actually works.

and this is from tesla: https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event But seems like Tesla discontinued battery swapping in favor of superchargers.

The ID card and id number make it safer than the alternatives.