Even from a pure financial perspective, given one benefit of these countries is you generally actually get useful benefits out of your tax dollars unlike the USA, wouldn't a better way of looking at this be some sort of weighted metric?
Imagine there's country A where i get a net salary of X and Y units of value out of my tax money. And country B where my net Salary is (X-M) and I get (Y+N) out of my tax money. Depending on the values of M & N, country B could be a clear winner at the end of the day.
You'd have to break this down into "archetypes" because like 90% of what you pay for is specific:
- retirement
- healthcare: negligible expense for most young people (for instance, about 80% goes to the 65+ in France)
- unemployment (a little more universal, with some large variations still)
Then there's everything to do with children (from direct subsidies to public schools or kindergarten slots), education (not everyone goes to university, for instance), and other subsidies that are income-dependent (two common ones in France are rent subsidy and a salary top-up for low-but-not-too-low incomes).
Plus, ultimately, 100% of what comes in goes out (modulo administrative costs) at the global scale, so you can't just average this or everywhere looks the same.
As someone that moved a bit through the EU, that's actually a pretty complex calculation, that's hard to distill into a single number.
My second biggest recurring expense is childcare. Having a child is something you are in control of, so the weight you might give to childcare benefits is something that wildly depends on your life plans.
Same with unemployment benefits. Would you rather a strong safety net and 8% unemployment (Like France), or a weaker net and 4% unemployment, like the Netherlands?
I think that depends on one's definition of disposable income. I think technically it's more or less what I was calling "net". But many people use it to mean "after I pay my mortgage, and my utilities, and my other thing". The further we go in that second direction the more it captures what I'm getting at.
As an example, if I have kids who need daycare and one country provides free daycare and another does not, then we need to account for the cost of daycare in our equation. And that may or may not fall under one's definition of disposable income.
The further you go in that direction, the more you have to include personal circumstances and values and the less useful it is for general comparison. Of course, the whole premise of looking at just average net income is a bit odd, so looking at expected quality of life makes more sense anyways.
100%. To use my daycare example, if someone didn't have kids, they're not realizing any value out of that.
So sure, there's an even more nebulous "value to society" concept, but since TFA is trying to get to dollars and cents I was trying to focus it on overall personal value. But even then one needs to not treat tax dollars equally.
My thought as well. If you have a kid and one country offers free daycare and the other does not, you ought to also do the math on how much you would have to pay for that for example. Or lets say one country has dirt roads and no public wster system and the other has top noch public infrastructure. One is going to be cheaper for the state.
The truth is that the tax rste alone is utterly meaningless.
Because you know where you don't have to pay taxes? If you live as a hermit in a desert cave. But that also means you won't benefit from the society around you. If you ignoring culture and which countries style of living you prefer (a werod idea, but ok), wouldn't it be wise to consider both the tax rate and what kind of society and surrounding it offers you in return?
Imagine there's country A where i get a net salary of X and Y units of value out of my tax money. And country B where my net Salary is (X-M) and I get (Y+N) out of my tax money. Depending on the values of M & N, country B could be a clear winner at the end of the day.