Not quite right: California + Federal tops out over 50%. Not by a lot and it obviously won't hit most people but it's an interesting benchmark.

Yeah and thats online income taxes!

Then with less than half left theres countless taxes built into the things you spend on (e.g. sales taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, import tariffs, etc etc etc etc and oh yeah more etc)

In California the top marginal tax rate can be over 50%. 37% federal tax, 12% state tax, 3.8% net investment tax.

Not sure what the net investment tax is, but just the normal Medicare tax (2.35%) is enough to get over 50% with federal and state income taxed there

That's on income over ~$500K AGI (which after deducting 401(k) )

So in California we were losing about half of our money to taxes, its always fun to make estimated tax payments when you received your quarterly RSUs(~40% of the RSU money goes to taxes when you get them) and then with the rest putting half of that towards a quarterly tax payment, we left the state to avoid the stranglehold of taxes and will probably go to 1 income as two high earners just isn't worth it, but if you like higher taxes move to Europe, you may love it there.

I'm not sure about tech salaries, but based on several surveys, it would appear that effective tax rate for most workers is about the same between european countries and united states. They just spend less on defense, and more on social programs (although some countries have very recently increased defense spending). California taxes are extremely high though, I agree.

>They just spend less on defense

Because the US takes up the slack. Something we need to seriously STOP doing :p

In CA it’s 13.3% for incomes over 1 million