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> Taxes are high in Europe because we fund older generations and have oversized wasteful public sector Everyone seems to forget the Eurozone Crisis from 2008-2
by alephnerd 2y ago
> Taxes are high in Europe because we fund older generations and have oversized wasteful public sector
Everyone seems to forget the Eurozone Crisis from 2008-2014 and how government debt skyrocketed.
A lot of that debt was also at bad terms due to the high risk profile during that time period.
The only easy lever a lot of European countries had to service their budgets was taxes, because a lot of other levels were handed off to the ECB.
- rsynnott 2y agoHow much of that is still at high rates? Ireland’s (at one point the second-highest debt to gdp ratio in the eurozone) average cost of debt servicing is ~1.5%; at that rate you don’t _want_ to pay it off. At least in Ireland it was largely refinanced since the crisis; I’d guess it’s similar in the other high-debt nations (except possibly Greece, where refinancing might be difficult).
- alephnerd 2y agoPortugal is in a similar boat to Greece. Ireland is very business and FDI friendly, has a fairly decent budget, and worked very hard to resolve it's debt problem in the 2010s. Ireland now has a ratio similar to that of Germany's, and Ireland has a credit rating of AAA for years now while Portugal only recently made it to BAA in the past year.
- bluecalm 2y agoBut it's always taxes on productive middle+ class. It's never land value tax so we can free up land and use it more efficiently or higher taxes on polluting businesses as that would hurt their owners or wealth tax so people who actually benefit the most from stable/safe country pay. It must be young generation to pay for mistakes of the previous one.