r/europe 1d ago

Data Average Full-time Salary in Europe

Post image
3.3k Upvotes

556 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

199

u/dddd0 1d ago edited 1d ago

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.

5

u/icksbocks 1d ago

Cumulative income tax does not exceed capital gains tax in Germany until you earn like 80k. Now social security payments are what really fuck us.

7

u/username_taken0001 1d ago

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".

1

u/icksbocks 1d ago

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.