#USpol #Norway #taxes #tax

@davidaugust

I wish for once someone would do a side by side comparison of all taxes and health costs for an average citizen of these 2 countries.

@nickapos @faliate @davidaugust Free dentists checks and care over here in Slovenia including x rays.

@davidaugust and poor people in the US often pay a higher tax rate than poor people in Norway, because of this little trick call “progressive taxation”

@davidaugust @nazokiyoubinbou Not same expense - there's plenty of evidence that you pay much more for less benefits. Which is not surprising, since that system is primarily a grift for private corporations to squeeze the population ever harder.

@davidaugust “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

@grb090423 @davidaugust people nowadays dont care for "we", they only care for "I"

@KanaMauna @davidaugust We (well I'm in Denmark, not in Norway, but same/same) also don't pay an arm and a leg for childcare...

@twallutis @davidaugust

Yes, there's a lot of that thinking but I'm hopeful that gradual growth of Green Party membership worldwide proves otherwise.

@ArtHarg @noplasticshower @davidaugust Add to that just over 6 million people in Denmark.
I definitely take home a bigger part of what I have earned here in Denmark when I calculate in health care, childcare and education for myself and my family.
/Edit: My point was, I used to live in Brooklyn, so it is not a theoretical comparison.

@jwcph @davidaugust I think you're probably right. For one thing, they inflate everything they can. The classic example being that a trip to the hospital means you'll see ambulance fees and stuff like "optimized nutritional supplementation" which is like $50 for a $0.25 cube of jello. (I forget exact terms they use, but it's utterly ridiculous...)

@davidaugust @nazokiyoubinbou

Don't use that term for the RIGHTS Europeans have fought for, and which are only possible because we have democracies where the common good is not an empty phrase. That's the difference between having parliamentary representation of citizens and an oligarchy where people are hoping for "benefits" from their master, err..., employer.

@WiseWoman As much as I love having free healthcare, parental leave etc, people in EU countries fall for fascism every other week.
@davidaugust

@davidaugust I liked Tim Wu's point the other day that private corporation in America are basically creating a "private tax", where they are being extractive and taking the profits while provide no value to consumers. His example of this was Amazon's pay-for-boosting merchants pay into, and that gets translated into higher consumer prices.

I wonder if you could analyze this "private tax", maybe the tax rate wouldn't be that different?

@davidaugust
"We pay more to the state" = "we pay more to ourselves". The Norwegians *are* the state; it's a democracy.

@jwcph @davidaugust @nazokiyoubinbou
Many of our European sovereign wealth or pension funds are probably invested in the US system and extracting 'value' too. We have outsourced labour exploitation to China and financial exploitation to the US.

@davidaugust if anyone is thinking the US system is better, look at maternal death rates

@davidaugust

Worth adding also that European state-funded healthcare produces better health outcomes for less money than the US privatised system.

Plus - not all Norwegians pay more than Americans anyway. What tax you pay in Europe generally depends on what you can afford.

@WiseWoman @davidaugust sadly there are plenty of European countries on the brink of falling for fascists lies and hollow promises.

@Pionir @WiseWoman @davidaugust Very true but with the USA in thrall of Orange Mussolini I'm not sure how that observation has any bearing on the pros and cons of one tax system compared to the other?

@davidaugust

From Germany, I absolutely agree. And it's interesting to note that healthcare is not tax financed here.

There are so many different implementations of this all over the industrialized world, and all of them work. Single payer tax-financed, multipayer tax-financed or completely private, or a mix like here in Germany.

But hey, dumb maga-american geniuses hear "50% taxes" on Faux Knews and fall for out-of-context misinformation or even outright lies, because they have no idea how a progressive tax system in an advanced country works. An average earner here pays probably lower taxes than in the US, but we have mandatory dues for social security including healthcare. They conflate this with taxes because that's what their tax-evading oligarchs tell them. What they don't tell them is that we don't have to pay for everything out of pocket. No extra premiums, and above all, no absurd copays, no surprise bills, no need to walk to the ER because you can't afford the ambulance. And most definitely no out-of-network nonsense.

Also, no PTO but real sick leave and real vacation days. Fresh mothers who don't have to return to their slave jobs the other day. No people dying because they can't pay for insuline. And we don't have one-person death panels in insurance offices who decide whether you get therapy.