zbigi wrote: ↑Thu May 04, 2023 1:40 pm
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.