> "Now with 42% income tax of a 100k salary, there’s a net of 58k arriving at your bank account over a year."

Oh boy, that's one of those misconceptions I'm really sick of. "The tax is so high, I pay almost half of my salary to the greedy state". No, you certainly don't! And if everyone please spent 5 minutes to understand the difference between the effective tax rate and the marginal tax rate, we'd finally get rid of that pointless discussion. With a 100k salary, there is ~75k net arriving at you bank account, if you're married. If you take care of children, it's even more.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einkommensteuer_(Deutschland)#...

I live in Norway and pay an 34% effective tax. The highest in the world at my salary level. I don't complain, because tax money is used for an excellent education system, including the best libraries I've ever been to, and not least for my own ~50k€ PhD salary that every single PhD student in town receives. Meanwhile my high school in Germany didn't even have soap dispensers in the bathrooms because highly skilled hacker news readers don't bother to learn the basics of their tax system before they go and vote for corrupt privatization parties that promise lower taxes and cut back public investments.

> "Money that your employer could otherwise add to your payout..." Also, please don't mix up taxes, insurance and pension. If you'd prefer to pay for medical expenses yourself, do the math. You don't want that, especially when you have a family.

This is also one of my pet peeves. I keep thinking “people do understand progressive taxation, right?”, but in discussions like this, I realize: no, maybe they don’t. If you’re a single filer who makes $180K in the US in 2022, you’re in the 32% tax bracket. But your effective federal tax rate is just over 21% — and that’s assuming you’re only taking the standard deduction.

Are you sure that they're mistaking marginal tax rates for effective tax rates, rather than you mistaking gripes about taxes in general for gripes about federal income tax in particular? In my state, a single filer making $180k pays 34.6% effective tax on income - 19.1% federal income, 6.4% FICA, and 9.2% state income tax. (And maybe 4% more from property taxes if they own a house in a major city, although that's a somewhat different subject.)

This is not to say that rich people are actually poor because of taxes, obviously, but it seems more likely that people would talk about these things in a somewhat inaccurate way than that they would be totally wrong about what they actually pay.

On the contrary, the OP has got it right (perhaps accidentally), and you're the one confusing things.

You're correct that taxes, insurance, and pensions are different things, but in the context of "what amount of money arrives in your bank account at the end of the month", I find it a distinction without a difference.

Plugging in a 100k brutto salary into https://www.bbx.de/brutto-netto-rechner/, yields 57k of take home pay for the year, which is within spitting distance of the 58k figure quoted by OP.

The _income taxes_ of it add to up to "only" ~29k, sure.

And your example of getting 75k on 100k of income if you're married only applies if your spouse doesn't work; which; while I'm sure is a commonly occurring situation, it feels disingenuous to not specify that when mentioning it.

Don't get me wrong — having immigrated from Poland, I am having exactly the same feelings you do towards paying high taxes in Norway — I'm more than happy to pay those, and I see a _world_ of difference in how that that money is used; but we can make _those_ arguments without downplaying the actual amount of money that goes to the State.

I explicitly said “tax (including insurances)” to make it clear that for a simple calculations of the money that doesn’t reach your bank account. Now in Germany the percentage of income that goes to health insurance is dictated by government, currently around 15%. While insurance is not tax, i’d dictated by government how much to pay, makes no big difference to a tax either.

This is wrong, getting ~58k in your bank account from a 100k salary for a single is certainly what you can expect. The 75k you mention will only happen if your spouse doesn't work at all, a rather disingenuous framing.

If you're happy paying high taxes, you shouldn't feel the need to hide the real numbers (even if you're hiding by omission).