I'm surprised that you seem to be surprised. In South Africa it's not super far off from that. Ignoring smaller tax brackets, income in the bracket of USD 48,5

I'm surprised that you seem to be surprised. In South Africa it's not super far off from that. Ignoring smaller tax brackets, income in the bracket of USD 48,500 to 102,900 is taxed at 41% with any higher earnings taxed at 45% [0]. On top of that we have 15% VAT on essentially everything we buy. Also, any "luxury" imported item, including all electronics, also has an additional substantial import tax on top of that, e.g. an iPhone is something like 9%. It gets even worse though, if I want decent quality health care, education and security I have to pay for all of those privately. Between my wife and 2 small kids, we pay at least USD 10,200 extra each year, and that's not including occupational, speech and physio therapy my now 5-year old, but prematurely born, is needing at the moment. An "advantage" for someone like me though is that a very large portion of our population is very poorly educated and thus cannot demand much of a salary, meaning that the domestic cleaner/child minder I employ is very affordable. Just the other day someone pointed out that the middle class here might not get much for their taxes (as we're essentially subsidizing the majority who are poor such that they tend to pay nothing except VAT) but on the flip side we wouldn't have domestic workers and gardeners be as affordable. [0]: https://www.sars.gov.za/tax-rates/income-tax/rates-of-tax-for-individuals/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-2 https://www.sars.gov.za/tax-rates/income-tax/rates-of-tax-fo...