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A European Citizens Initiative wants to introduce a Wealth Tax (and they need your help)
(www.tax-the-rich.eu)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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If we look at recent data here it's actually worse than what we were discussing. According to official statistics average wage is 1,463€/month in 2023... so that makes up to about 20k/year.
Also, looking at the actual numbers, in Portugal you hit the 37% tax bracket at just €27,000 and 45% at around €50,000. These salaries definitely do not make you rich, but they make you owe a ton of taxes.
Additionally, as stated on the article, the rich already pay an extra:
......
What I'm actually saying is that there are a lot of middle class people here that get fucked over every time the "tax the rich" dialog comes along because the govt considers people making 33k+/year to be rich.
Bottom line is: whenever the radical left here starts bitching and pushing for legal changes on taxes then the barely surviving 33k/year middle class gets squeezed again and nothing else changes.
This "taxing the rich" stuff is kind of a lie people like to throw around because if you're making 300k/year you'll always have ways around the income tax and you won't be paying anyways.
Average salary is a broken metric always look for median. 31k that is median just plain fucked sure the tax doesn't help but 31k isn't a livable salary in the country by my metrics that being said. I am sure a 2 income house hold for a 3br is more accurate of a situation since globally single income households are just not realistic. Even if you made 31k with 0 tax I don't see how that would be livable still not worth breaking tax system because idk what other welfare you all have but losing free health care would make your country worse off
Yeah it isn't.
Probably not, but you're still assuming that the "free healthcare" works while in fact it doesn't.
You pay an extra 11% of your income for social security that will give you a retirement pension (assuming the fund doesn't go bankrupt), unemployment protection (around minimum wage for a period of time) and that's about it.
Why we have progressive rates. A flat tax will still make a 31k persons life more miserable in this country the lower tax ranges need to be adjusted. In America if you don't make enough money we send you money. Almost like a ubi. 100k people won't be hurt if more money they make is taxed.
Paid health care is way worse. I already 1.4% for old people healthcare(I don't get access to) and I pay around 4.5% weekly to health insurance that I can't use until I spend $6,000 in healthcare services and still have to pay money to see doctors. In America so many people go without insurance or just die because they can't get things taken care of.
Most articles say Portugal healthcare is better or on par with America's system for patient outcomes. But what the article don't mention you have be able to afford to get into the system in America. I haven't visited a doctor in 15 years.
A guaranteed pension is super strong versus a retirement plan that is in the stock market because a crash could wipe out the whole fund.
Lastly why isn't the rich not paying more in salaries and why isn't money more equitable In Portugal?
It may be but at the same time since COVID our healthcare has been a total mess. Waiting lists are crazy, sometimes you can't get simple tetanus vaccines or you can't get healthcare unless it's something really urgent because there aren't any doctor to attend you on a regular basis.
Have a look at this https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2022-05-03/hospital-waiting-times-concerning-portuguese/66794 and https://www.statista.com/statistics/1477807/portugal-waiting-time-by-medical-specialty/. When you've to wait 120 days for a cardiology consultation you'll most likely die in the meantime. There are a lot of cases of people waiting months or even years for simple surgeries.
Well the thing is that we don't really know how guaranteed it will be and what values we will be talking about in a few years. Maybe minimum wage for everyone independently of the money you payed each month of your working life - it's looking a lot like that and that's not fair at all.
Because it's hard for most companies to pay employees 30k or more. Consider this, for a 30k income the employee will pay 37-43% income tax + 11% social security, then the employer pays another 11% among other useless crap and legal compliance stuff.
To be fair if you look at millionaires in Portugal the biggest majority came from somewhere else. It's really hard to make money in these economic context, people have almost no disposable income it's a race to the bottom in every market, large monopolies rule over sectors backed by corrupt politicians.
The country needs more entrepreneurs and businessman but they can't survive the corporate taxes, crazy interests on loans and all the crazy regulations put in place to gatekeep new companies from the market.
Let me give you an example of how pathetic things are: there aren't many houses however there's a lot of space to build but building is expensive because you've to get a bunch of licenses and fulfill a lot of requirements.
One of those is you've to submit a project for a gas boiler and stove even if you don't plan to install and use those. Even more ridiculous, if the place where you're building doesn't have the public infrastructure to deliver natural gas to you then you're still required to deliver. A project like this may add 10-20k to your total cost for no reason and without it you won't be allowed to build the house.
10k seems small on a house but if you start pilling bullshit requirements like that you'll reach 50k or more in useless stuff. You also have construction permits and whatnot.
It is the same in the usa for healthcare unless you can spend money. Sometimes people will save for a year so they can take a day or week off for surgery.
Sounds like less of a tax problem and more of a things are to expensive problem. Or government needs to regulate more problem and you have corrupt politicians. All these companies are profitable right? Then they can pay more.
I believe it's both problems... because 40% of your income in taxes it a lot, if that value was around 20% people would be able to live much better.
Yes, a lot of corrupt politicians.
Most of them (at least on energy, transportation, basic utilities, etc.) where public companies that got privatized because they went into debt and the govt couldn't manage the abyss anymore. Those companies may show some profits and usually pay a bit over the average eg. so you may get to the 30k range if you've a masters engineering degree or something higher education but not much else.
Even at that level it's kind of hard, if you pay an employee 2.5k/month gross he will get a net of 1.9k/month. if you scale to 3k/month gross = 2.1k/month net. As you can see it's hard to increase wages because you get run over by taxes. Bigger companies usually get around this by renting cars for employees and giving our a few other benefits that while may be helpful completely hinder the ability for families to grow and save some money.
When you're required to pay an extra 500€/month so the employee gets just an extra 200€ you've to go get that money from somewhere and somewhere is the market... so prices raise and people can't afford the stuff they need etc. etc.
Meanwhile the majority of the population works for small companies that are barely surviving drowning in debt and trying to comply with all the stupid legal requirements in place. People here make way less and work more overtime.