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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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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.