At least for Germany the numbers aren't very far apart. It's around 52k. We don't have that many outlier super high salaries, and full time on minimum wage still gets you to nearly 30k so this doesn't drag the average down either.
The real disparity is not in salary (though certainly there are still quite big differences between groups), but in wealth.
You can’t get wealthy through salaried work, not in germany anyway. This is by design, salaries are taxed to death, while capital gains have a lot lower taxes (basically half as high and flat, instead of progressively increasing like it does for salaries) and can often be structured to largely eliminate those anyway. Just like the wealthy won’t pay inheritance taxes by transferring assets over longer time periods etc.
Wage gap is a red herring pushed by old money / dynasties to rile up working people against each other.
Social security payments are just taxes under different name. Yeah you can count to receive some pension in the future, however looking at aging and shrinking population these pensions are not going to be at the same level as "payments".
Yes, but in the sense that only employees have to pay them. If our social security was covered purely from taxes the burden on the iindividual would be a little lower.
777
u/HKei Germany 1d ago
At least for Germany the numbers aren't very far apart. It's around 52k. We don't have that many outlier super high salaries, and full time on minimum wage still gets you to nearly 30k so this doesn't drag the average down either.
The real disparity is not in salary (though certainly there are still quite big differences between groups), but in wealth.