It all depends on what the aggregate deductions that are outside your control sum to, and what you get for the money.
In Ontario, it would be about 38%, and that’d include healthcare. Canada is very efficient though. At least a decade ago, Canada’s non-defense spending per person was less than the US’s.
In Germany it would be about 44% total. Of course, in Germany, $200k is a top 2% income. In California it’s only a top 8% income.
That's what's directly taken out of your check right? But how much more do you pay after that in other taxes? And if you go even further, how much higher are the prices of everything that you purchase due to the various taxes involved in their production?
On €100,000 a year you pay €57,512 in tax (58% tax). On €60,000 a year it's only €32,405 (54%).
See:
https://be.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=100000&from=year...
https://be.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=60000&from=year&...
Are there EU countries where you pay more than 60% for you make the "no more than 60% tax" sound like such a good deal?
AFAIK 60% is pretty much the top end of income tax rates as far as EU goes.
Also, in many EU states, companies contribute to social security. In some this is indexed to profits, but on others this is indexed into wages, so if you count that bit, taxes directly attributable to your income can easily exceed 60% of what a company pays out.
I don't know if Belgium is using that loophole when counting the 60%, though.
I have no idea about this. Can you explain what you mean and give some examples of such countries ?
>Also, in many EU states, companies contribute to social security. In some this is indexed to profits, but on others this is indexed into wages, so if you count that bit, taxes directly attributable to your income can easily exceed 60% of what a company pays out.
True. Some EU countries also tax the gross salary the employer has to give you before it gets to you, which is in bad faith not included in payslips. So when you negotiate your 60k gross wage, it's actually costing your employer something like 72k Euros. I hate this shady practice.
Probably countries like Ireland, Montenegro, Belize, etc which act as tax havens for foreign corporations. Or Singapore, while also a tax haven, acts as a center for regional trade.
They could also mean resource rich countries that sell mineral rights to foreign corporations, who made investments in infrastructure in order to facilitate their operations, and they pay back dividends to the state, which offset the tax burden of the local population.
Their inward FDI stock to GDP ratio is around 250%, which is about 4× the EU average; and Ireland does this with a decently sized economy.
And then there's Luxembourg (1400%) and Malta (2000%) which arguably do much “worse” but are comparatively tiny.
I didn't do the math for every EU country. Those were just some of the few that came to mind. For instance, Cyprus has similar values to Ireland, but the Irish economy is 15× bigger.
When there's a lot of foreign money going through your economy and you can tax it to moderate amounts, you get to offer lower rates to your own citizens.
Which is great, but obviously doesn't scale if every country tries to do the same.
If an American factored in the totality of their tax burden, it would be pretty high. The USA has the benefit of higher incomes and a gigantic population, so there's some economies of scale. But even so, add up all of income tax (federal, state, city, county), sales taxes, property taxes, tariffs, tolls, etc and the % is already pretty high. After factoring the cost of benefits that are free/subsidized in other countries, and the cost probably averages out to the same.
Of course, European countries can also have those same consumption taxes. But I'm not sure if OP factored that in.
These taxes are even higher in many EU countries than the US, especially sales tax. Same for tolls, tariffs, etc. they're all higher here. Also commodity products and services are generally more expensive here than in the US.
I see on youtube the hobby stuff Americans do in theri garage with home labs, electronic measuring equipment, power tools and stuff, and if I want to replicate their setups it would cost way more here(from a smaller wage), not to mention buying a house with a garage in Europe is very much of out of budget to most working class in Europe to begin with.
All this stuff being so cheap is probably why Americans in their garages are so much more entrepreneurial.
>After factoring the cost of benefits that are free/subsidized in other countries, and the cost probably averages out to the same.
True, but a lot of free stuff you get back from the government is sometimes of low quality due to never being enough money for everything everyone needs and not being able to attract and keep qualified workers to stay in the public system when they can earn more privately, and it's only getting worse since Covid and Ukraine.
For example, I am now paying ~1000 Euros for private physiotherapy after my accident, since the free government one is abysmal, which I am forced to pay for anyway out of my salary even though it's useless.
Another example, after my jaw surgery at the public hospital here they just strap cold packs to your face like in WW2, while in the US, my ex-boss who went through a similar procedure at a hospital there they had specialized head cooling devices instead of medieval ice packs, while also being free from his employer insurance. So you might pay more in the US for health insurance, but you also get more in return.
So there's valid reasons why skilled immigration to the US is so high despite all the issues the US has.
Is it possible to live middle class life on around 27K?
You can see the Belgian tax scale here:
https://fin.belgium.be/en/private-individuals/tax-return/inc...
And then of course quality of life, but that's very individual.
How can people lie with a straight face and then get upvoted for it?
"Belgium recorded 184 firearm incidents in 2024 (mostly drug-related), causing 20 deaths and 81 injuries, with Brussels as the main hotspot. Antwerp has also seen surges, with 81 drug-linked shootings/explosions in 2022 alone."
- May 24, 2014 - Brussels: Shooting rampage at the Jewish Museum by ex-ISIS fighter Mehdi Nemmouche, killing four people.
- March 22, 2016 - Brussels: Coordinated ISIS-claimed suicide bombings at Zaventem Airport (16 killed) and Maelbeek Metro Station (16 killed), totaling 32 deaths and hundreds injured.
- August 7, 2016 - Charleroi: Machete attack on two policewomen outside a station; ISIS claimed responsibility, two wounded.
- August 22, 2016 - Brussels: Machete-wielding woman attacked bus passengers, wounding three.
- October 5, 2016 - Brussels: Knife attack on two policemen in a suspected terrorist incident.
- May 28-29, 2018 - Liège: Radicalized prisoner Benjamin Herman killed a former accomplice, two police officers, and a passenger in a shooting and stabbing spree; ISIS claimed it, four killed total (including perpetrator).
- November 20, 2018 - Brussels: Knife attack on a police officer in the city center while shouting "allahu akbar," one wounded.
- January 9, 2023 - Antwerp: Shots fired into a house in a drug-related attack, killing an 11-year-old girl and wounding three others (her father and siblings).
- October 16, 2023 - Brussels (Schaerbeek): Tunisian national Abdesalem Al Guilani shot three Swedish soccer fans, killing two; claimed by ISIS, perpetrator killed by police.
- December 6, 2023 - Brussels: Gang-related shooting wounded five people.
- February 7, 2025 - Brussels (Anderlecht): Drug-trafficking-linked shooting killed one man in a known dealing hotspot; part of a week with multiple incidents wounding others.
- October 8, 2025 - Brussels: Two teenagers opened fire, wounding four; suspects arrested after a chase.
And Chicago had 2853 gun violence incidents in 2024. On a population of 2.7 million. Belgium had 184 incidents on a population of 11.8 million. That is about 67 times more incidents.
Wait a second friend, first you claim "basically no crime, no guns", then when confronted with the facts, instead of taking accountability and correcting, you move the goalposts to some high-crime US city.
I'm sure Brussels is super safe if you use Mogadishu as the point of comparisons, but if we were to keep the discussion in good faith and stick to comparisons with EU cities, my eastern european city has literally zero crime and guns making Belgium look like a warzone by comparison.
We have literally zero people killed by suicide explosives, guns or machetes compared to Brussels. How can people look at those crimes and go like "yeah, it's not so bad, you only have a relatively small chance of being killed" ?
OP is right, if those are the worst things to happen in the past 12 years, that's effectively 0 crime.
Especially when you consider that so much of what you listed were actually terrorists attacks conducted by an organization that hasn't conducted a foreign terror attack since winning control of their own territory from foreign occupiers.
If that's "zero crime" from your frame of reference, then what are the cities that have actual zero crime? -100 crime?
I'm also curious, if you or a family member would have been a victim in one of those violent incidents that don't happen in other EU cities, if you'd still have considered it "zero crime".
Is it one of those cases where people see violent crime as just a statistic and they had waive it easily? Because I can't.
Basically no crime was pretty obvious.
Then please argument using logic why it's obvious. I explained why it isn't oblivions, as per HN rules.
Subjectively sure, each to his own, it might be obvious to you if you're ideologically aligned with the poster, but for good faith debate, you'll need to add actual arguments to convince the other people of your take. Imagine telling the judge "it's obvious your honor" as your only argument to why you're in the right.
>As a passerby, I'm honestly not sure what pedantic hill you think you're dying on.
No hill dying here, I'm just pushing for facts over blind ideologies.
The post you replied to wasn't written in math or C, so you're trying to objectively disprove a qualitative statement.
In short: https://www.wheatonslaw.com/
And yes obviously there are guns in Belgian society but with no guns I was referring to how regular people don't walk around with guns. If you play football and your ball enters someone yard you don't have to worry about getting shot.
I believe their point was that Brussels is “super safe” compared to Chicago. 67 times fewer gun incidents is quite a lot.
I live in Dublin, Ireland, which is a lot smaller than Brussels, and when there is a shooting it gets on the news. You can imagine how amused I was coming from São Paulo that a full-on gang war was going on when I arrived here and 4 people had been shot in the previous year.
A friend of mine who also came from São Paulo, a trauma surgeon, had to change specialty here because there simply isn’t enough work.
If you insist to go this route, you can definitely find cities even in the US with less violent crime than Brussels.
If you look at places in US with similar white European demographics (New Hampshire at <2 per 100k) the homicide rate isn't that much worse than Belgium (~1.2 per 100k).
The best predictor of being a victim of violence in the USA is to be black, the ~second best predictor is to be in a state with a high proportion of black people. If you are in a state that is ~as white as Belgium, the rate goes way way down.
I expect small cities and towns in the suburbs, where native Belgians are a majority, to have virtually zero violent crime, which would flatten out the crime spike of Brussels into good looking national averages.
(In fact, your life expectancy in Cook County is several years higher than in the rural south.)
The gun violence in Chicago is tightly constrained to places and populations unfamiliar to the median Belgian. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and structurally segregated by almost a century of redlining and "urban renewal" that created hyperconcentrated pockets of crime. It's a human tragedy and fully worth dunking on, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with how safe a visitor would be to the city.
(Chicago is also not even in the top 10 in US cities by index crimes, but whatever).
And today with the European white guilt it's full of Africans who hate not only their people , but European traditions and culture. This is the reality.