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0 pointsvostok8y ago0 comments

As an American, I incur the below costs:

* $18,000/year 401k contribution (similar to pension, but I take on the market risk)

* $5,500/year IRA contribution (similar to pension, but I take on the market risk)

* $200,000 total in tuition per child at my alma mater.

* Health insurance costs. This can easily be $12,000/year or more for a family.

None of these are included in the tax amounts that we pay.

This is also not considering that German cities are much cheaper than equivalently walkable American cities.

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rayiner8y ago· 2 in thread

German social security is roughly similar to ours. So if you want to live comfortably in retirement, you have to put extra money away there too. As for health insurance: employers cover on average 71% of insurance premiums for families; at the $100k mark, it's probably significantly higher than that. Finally, as for tuition--you get cheap tuition in Germany because: (1) people making 30,000 Euros are getting taxed a lot more to pay for it; and (2) most kids get tracked out of college and sent to apprenticeship at 16.

If we taxed our middle class what Germany taxes its middle class, we could afford cheap tuition too (for the 1/4 of our kids we chose to send to college).

Tiksi8y ago

> If we taxed our middle class what Germany taxes its middle class, we could afford cheap tuition too.

While I'm in favor of free/cheap education, this made me think of a convincing argument for the student loan / US system. Those who benefit from the education are "taxed" for it in the form of loan payments for a few years, those who don't benefit (directly) from the education are not.

I guess ideally you could balance the benefit to society vs the benefit to the individual getting the education and subsidize it proportionally. But that's obviously not practical so we should probably push closer to the society end of the margin of error.

vostokOP8y ago

I agree that it's not so simple.

> Those who benefit from the education are "taxed" for it in the form of loan payments for a few years, those who don't benefit (directly) from the education are not.

Not only that, but the benefits of free/cheap education largely accrue to the middle and upper classes whereas the lower class also has significantly higher taxes under the European system.

I'm most familiar with the UK where universities like Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Imperial, etc. are all overwhelmingly middle class. I'm sure the pattern is repeated in Europe as well.

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