Active Investors, what is your "routine"?

[chenda]

@Bankai - yeah it sounds very cushy at that income level, although I suppose they'll be paying tax when they start withdrawing their pension so to some extent it's more of a tax deferment.

[loutfard]

I once had a recruiter contact me for a non-remote contract in Belgium that paid particularly well, so I looked up taxation in Belgium, and the above shocked me. Holy cow. Is Belgium a welfare state paradise? Where does all that tax money go to?

Yes, a welfare state. I don't object to that per se.

Quite a bit goes to unemployment benefits that are unlimited in time. The chronically unemployed also get a fairly good government pension. A lot goes to subsidies to companies. Some goes to direct wage subsidies for specific difficult-to-employ people.

Quite a bit also goes to universal public health care. Ridiculously good in comparison to the rest of the world, and not a lot more expensive.

Public and government subsidised education are also funded appropriately. Engineering education for example is very high quality and almost free compared to most other EU states.

Transportation and infrastructure also get rather heavily subsidised. The Belgian railway infrastructure and operations get a lot more subsidies than Amtrak for the entire US.

Social housing is also a thing, but noticeably less developed than in places like the Netherlands or the UK.

There is a brain drain. Quit a few well-educated Belgians geo-arbitrage to Bulgaria, Luxemburg, Switzerland, the US. Before brexit, the UK also had quite a few. It's funny. The government "solution" is not to lower taxes, but to create a special regime for expats coming to Belgium. They pay less tax, or they wouldn't come.

I see something much more frustrating than high labour taxation about government policy. Belgian government is very opinionated about what economic activity it stimulates and what it discourages. If I try to use my sofware development skills to earn some side income, that gets very heavily discouraged. If I go wash dishes or clean hotels, that gets encouraged.

[Stahlmann]

If I try to use my sofware development skills to earn some side income, that gets very heavily discouraged. If I go wash dishes or clean hotels, that gets encouraged.

Does it boil to monetary value of given works or is there any ideology behind this?

BTW, I created once topic about different welfare states, I know you replied. But... are there any paradises like this, for example with such unemployment solutions? (don't reply here other folks)

[loutfard]

Does it boil to monetary value of given works or is there any ideology behind this?

It's just a side effect of pressure cooker level taxation I think. Fixing that problem in a universal way is too expensive (loss of taxable base) and/or difficult (special interest lobbies) to achieve, so the natural "solution" is to add more exception regimes. It's often compared to a home owner building all kinds of sloppy small extensions to his home without much forethought.

- The powers that be notice that they can't find any cleaners, and many of the existing ones went into the black market because. Solution: wage subsidies for cleaners.
- Highly skilled foreigners don't want to come work here because taxation eats most of their wages. Solution: a special regime for high skilled expats. Oh, not easy because the EU doesn't allow us to discriminate our own citizens. Let's make this very contorted to comply with the letter of EU law/
- Restaurants don't find any staff, but we don't want to cannibalise wage taxes. Solution: anyone with a full-time job already (and the associated tax and social security payments) can go work extra in a low paid restaurant job and keep 75% of the employer wage cost instead of +- 30% of employer cost.
- Oh, now the event sector has much more difficulties finding people to do the work. And they've had such a difficult time during covid. Let's give them the same advantage.
- Repeat ad nauseum.

BTW, I created once topic about different welfare states, I know you replied. But... are there any paradises like this, for example with such unemployment solutions? (don't reply here other folks)

Sorry, I'm not entirely sure I understand your question.

[xmj]

Can you take this into a separate thread and move that one to the politics zone please

[zbigi]

Can you take this into a separate thread and move that one to the politics zone please

That is the problem, or perhaps benefit, of using forum software where threads have linear structure (instead of tree-like). Any interesting offshoot conversation needs to be nipped in the bud, or otherwise the thread becomes illegible. However, one can say that it keeps the forum focused, as threads on forums using tree structures, such as Hacker News, tends to quickly spawn one of common, low-effort tangents (housing prices, salaries in FAANG, crypto being a scam etc.), which then dominate the thread and make it hard to find the content actually relevant to the original subject.

[loutfard]

Can you take this into a separate thread and move that one to the politics zone please

Sorry for having veered fairly far off topic closer to politics. I tried to move it to the politics section, but just noticed that is closed off. Which probably indicates that this kind of discussion is not encouraged here. Which is fine. I don't feel a strong urge to further explain about the complete picture of the unique situation regarding ERE in Belgium anyway. I was merely trying to politely reply to other people's questions.

I'll try to confine Belgium specific comments to practical issues encountered.