Working people in Ireland also pay high taxes on their income.
In Ireland you pay 20% income tax on the first €35,300, and 40% on income above this amount (if you are a single person, there are different cut-offs for married people and one-parent families).
You also pay an additional Universal Social Charge on all income over €13,000 - between 2-8% depending on your income level, or 11% for self-employed income over €100,000. Add on pay related social insurance (PRSI) of 4% too.
Don’t forget the ridiculous property prices and rapacious rental market. The skyrocketing unchecked insurance costs and the 25% VAT and the total of 33% tax on cars (VAT + questionably legal VRT). Ireland is only a low tax economy if you don’t live here.
This case has nothing to do with income taxes. In Ireland we actually pay more than Germany with the additional USC taxes (which is essentially income tax in disguise).
The range starts at six percent (assuming full-time employment and minimum wage, it can drop lower if you are working part-time).
It’s at 15 percent for people earning the median wage (€3,300), meaning half of all Germans pay 15 percent or less of their salary in income tax. Your range if very far removed from reality. (It is true, though, that for very high incomes 35 percent aren’t the ceiling, that’s somewhere in the forties if you are making several hundred thousand per month.)
Well, adding mandatory payments/taxes such as, social security, health insurance (%7.45 + %7.45 paid by employer), unemployment insurance and solidarity tax, pushes it to 20 percent - 35 percent area, based on your tax class. I am not even talking about the church tax if you are religious. In my opinion, I do not see any difference between income tax and the mandatory taxes.
My net income/gross income ratio is 0.59, which means an effective tax rate of %41.
Are you sure about that they are not taxes? Those payments are decided based on a percentage of your income and are mandatory, which really sounds like a tax.
Mandatory insurances/payments are taxes in disguise, where you support other people directly for a specific purpose, unlike indirectly for a general purpose. Either way, the state gets the money and distributes it, just like a tax.
