I believe the way it works here (US), is most people with the standard deduction works for probably 80-90% of cases because their finances aren't complex enough or they're not doing enough where the deductions exceed the standard. So most would be fine with government just telling you what you owe/they owe and you just signing off or making a correction.

If you're doing a lot of charity donations, real estate, student loan debt, saving receipts for work related expenses, calculating depreciation on assets, etc, then its worth it, but by then you probably have a personal accountant doing it for you, not a program.

Also factor in the removal of the State and Local Tax deduction. Prior to that I ended up writing off my CA taxes instead of taking the standard deduction.

I’ll save my personal political ranting for a different space.

Addressing the GP, yeah our system has been messed with by the tax prep companies. One year I had a complicated (for me) tax situation and I hired a CPA. They managed to make a mistake that lead me to overpaying by thousands. The IRS was nice enough to mail me a check.

The IRS clearly has enough info to run a European style system. We (as a country) just underfund the IRS and have special interest vested in maintaining the status quo. Clearly those special interests are doing a great job if someone with a state certification and professional tax software can mess up the math. A friend had the same issue with this past tax year and owes a balance plus penalties. She has every intention of paying her taxes. Why does our system make it hard for her to do so?

There’s no good reason why we should have to chance these situations. We should just be able to pay our taxes correctly at time we are paid and move on.

It's not only Europe. I live in Uruguay and I got an SMS to check if my auto-filed taxes were correct, if I do I have the option to make changes right in the government website.

And the local IRS has the best paying software development jobs in the government, so they actually have decent software (although they could do with some more UX people).

Also the standard deduction was recently significantly increased (I think it was doubled in 2017, can't remember for sure the exact the time/amount though), so it's a better deal for even more people.

I'm Dutch as well. A couple of years ago my university fees were made tax deductible, I'm hazy on the details but basically I dropped out of my masters degree to work on a startup. Normally if you finish your degree some of your costs are relieved by the government with some loan forgiveness scheme. After 5 years or so they decided I definitely wasn't finishing that degree and all my university costs were suddenly tax deductible.

Obviously I had no idea of this scheme, I have no accountant and my university fees of 5 years ago were far from my mind.

Randomly got €6000 euros income tax back, very nice windfall courtesy of the Netherlands government.

That seems like a surprisingly large amount of money. I thought university wasn't that expensive there (enough that the deduction of the income saved 6000 euros on taxes). Did you mean it became a tax credit and you just got all the money you paid in fees back?

Yeah it was all of it for three years, education costs are 100% deductible, so if it was 3 years at 2000/yr (standard university rate back then) it would be 6000 total. I forgot the exact amount because in that same year I also bought a house and there's a bunch of tax deductibles there as well, I think I got back over 8000 in total that year.

Normally the final dues are a lot less, probably 0 for people who have no mutations and a regular job. I had to pay 300 euro this year because I did a single freelance gig on the side.

edit: Note that this is probably a very exceptional situation. Normally college students don't make enough money to be paying taxes in the first place, I had the perfect storm of having all the deductibles being applicable in a single year, and making a good wage that year. I'm just telling this story because it's an example of the system randomly giving me the sort of tax benefit even a dedicated accountant might have missed, just because it system applied its rules to all the information it has about me.

In the US that's called a "tax credit". A "deduction" is something that reduces the amount of income used for tax calculations.

So I thought you meant you got 6000 back because your university fees became deductable. At 25% tax rate, that would be 24,000 in fees. It sounds like you got a tax credit.

Hmm, you're right. So there's one thing I didn't mention and that is that my income was abnormally high that year because I was bought out of the company I resigned from. Pushing me into the 50% tax rate territory. This might have made the deductibles that much more significant. I would have to look up the exact numbers to know for sure.

And yet all those deductions are possible in France. You make it sound like they'd be impossible to claim with that system.

> did you get the "best deal"?

From my experience with the NL tax system, next to nothing is deductible. Very straightforward taxes, they take 51% of all personal income. ;)

AVG income tax in NL is 28%. It's progressively banded like most other countries. With complications for withheld income (pensions, etc).

Could you source the average tax rate number? That’s only the base tax rate for all income above ~20k.

Honestly, it was a two-second Google for "nl average tax rate". I didn't look at it any deeper at the time but the source was https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-netherlands...

> In the Netherlands, the average single worker faced a net average tax rate of 28.7% in 2020, compared with the OECD average of 24.8%. In other words, in the Netherlands the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.3% of their gross wage, compared with the OECD average of 75.2%.

The specific number wasn't as important as pointing out that NL doesn't have a magically fixed number (and certainly not a high one) for income taxation.

If this figure is true, do you see the symbolism of it as I do? It's not 49%, where the individual will still work mostly for themselves but 51%, where the state owns the majority of the labor for each individual. I find this number chilling.

The figure is not true, it used to be 51% for income above a certain amount (I think 60000?) but now it's 49,50% for income above 68000. Even when it was 51%, you would have to make more than 500,000 for the total taxes to be exceed 50%.

Anyway, what's chilling about it? You're phrasing it in a very weird way, the state doesn't own labor. It is due taxes for its services rendered.

The Netherlands is ridiculously rich and the government takes very good care of its citizens. I think it's hard to imagine for Americans how much value we get from our government. Traveling from The Netherlands to the states. Even your richest cities have poor people hungry, suffering and distressed just camping around everywhere. I'm not saying we've got it perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the deal we got.

The 500k figure is quite misleading. Sure that’s for 51%, but anything over 100k, it already exceeds 40%. That’s still a huge number.

There are tons of poor and hungry people in NL, and the gov is actively hostile to homelessness. There’s lots of municipal corruption, and central inefficiency. I know lots of Dutch citizens who are in student debt, and very few families who can afford to buy a home before 35.

It’s a fallacy that somehow this is the /the/ tax rate that can provide for citizens. There is no magic number, and we can always demand more efficiency.

To me it's simple. My tax as someone trying to get a startup to work is about 30%, it would be 22% in the US. That means I pay 8% extra to be largely abstracted from the harsh reality of the suffering of the unlucky and disadvantaged.

Check this video out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKo8Sv99MkM That's about Skid Row, it's how one of the US's richest cities deals with the disadvantaged.

Dutch citizens with student debt.. that's a joke right?

To add on to my other comment -

Student debt:

https://nltimes.nl/2020/10/27/average-student-loan-eu700-per...

“An average loan of 700 euros per month means that study debts of 50,000 euros are no longer an exception. (…) It makes sense that students work more due to higher costs of room rent and tuition fees and less income thanks to the lack of the basic grant.”

Home ownership:

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

The NL and USA differ in home ownership by ~4% (69 vs 65.3). That’s not statistically significant to be honest.

—-

There’s a lot of myths in Dutch society, and the majority of people are not aware of reality.

I have a student debt of over 40,000 euro. Because I have a job I pay 250 euros per month on it. My partner has a similar debt, but because she does not have a job she doesn't make any payments. Does it suck, yeah. Does it make us poor or hurt us in any significant way? No.

It's a joke, because student debt is a sign of wealth, not of poverty. My government invested almost 50,000 euro into giving me plenty of time and space to study. I was able to live as a student for 7 years, usually working less than 12 hours per week to supplement the loan. I leveraged that loan into getting an education is super valuable, if I wanted to I could take a job double my current salary and live very comfortably in Amsterdam.

Different story for my partner perhaps, but if she never makes income, after a certain amount of time her loan will be forgiven even without her ever making payments.

I don't know how home ownership is correlated to poverty. It's tied to wealth, sure, and it's a very bad thing that it's so low. But the average renting person in The Netherlands lives very comfortably, so not owning a home is not a strong indicator for poverty.

Homelessness, that's the indicator you're looking for. But you are right, it seems I am living in a bubble, because there's a severe problem with homelessness in The Netherlands right now. https://nltimes.nl/2020/02/17/homelessness-netherlands-doubl...

According to wikipedia there's more registered homeless people in The Netherlands than there are in the states, I don't know how to make sense of that because the scenes I saw in SF, Portland and SLC were unlike anything I've seen in any wealthy European country. It made me think of Hungary and Romania.

The reason it seems so bad in those particular cities is because they actually attract and retain homeless. One due to weather and two, as poor as the services are for the homeless in those cities, they are better than many other cities.

You wouldn't last long living on the streets of Fargo North Dakota.

> abstracted from the harsh reality of the suffering of the unlucky and disadvantaged

> Dutch citizens with student debt.. that's a joke right?

To be brutally honest, both these statements lead me to believe that you live in a bubble within NL.

I personally know tons of Dutchies in both situations, and I have a feeling you might (unknowningly) as well. Might be worth expanding your social circle if not.

> very few families who can afford to buy a home before 35

So, imagine knowing very few families who can afford to buy a home. Like, at all. So long as we're still comparing the Netherlands and the US, I don't think there's much of a contest.

That said, the central thrust of your comment holds true; always room for improvement.

> I don't think there's much of a contest.

Now, this may surprise you, since you haven’t bothered to research it (1), but NL and USA differ in home ownership by ~4% (69 vs 65.3). That’s not statistically significant to be honest.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...

> where the state owns the majority of the labor for each individual

I guess that it all depends what do you get back. To live in a well functioning society is worth a kingdom.

In many places your landlord owns more than half of your income, that could be more worrisome. At least I can vote for my representants in the government.

Finally, I pay over 50% on part of my salary in Sweden, with what I have left I have an awesome live and extra to save, so I will not complain.

> In many places your landlord owns more than half of your income

My understanding of rent in both Sweden and the Netherlands, is that of any EU capital: easily 30-50% of your monthly income goes to landlords.

Could you clarify your view on this?

Meanwhile other markets were heavenly corrected around 2009-2015 after the housing crush Sweden came out quite unscratched. Low interest rates also have created an incentive to invest in housing for the average citizen. On the other side construction companies in Sweden are quite shy to build new housing as investment goes to other more profitable industries, Sweden is below EU average in construction. Finally Sweden population have grown more than the EU average.

So, the swedish housing availability is insufficient and prices reflect that. It is an imbalance that is difficult to solve short term. And probably also overpriced as the interest rates are low and predicted to be low.

I read your comment twice, but I still don’t see any agreement about the high rents going to landlords in Sweden. Perhaps you bought a house a while ago, and have been insulated from this crisis. Either way, you can’t deny reality…

Marginal tax rates in California also reach this level. Health insurance is not included.