> The western governments introduced more and more “hidden” taxes. So just looking at income tax is not fair.
Please don't pluck figures like that out of thin air - I worked in Berlin as a developer and I easily took home ~60% of my monthly salary (placing tax at around 40%).
Those taxes already comprise of Social Security* (roughly 20%) and income tax (the remainder 20%).
* Health, Retirement, Unemployment etc.
The table on wikipedia[1] shows Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden at all over 50%. Germany at 44.5% while the UK is 34.4%, Australia at 34.3% and United States at 26%
[0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=REV#
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/113...
Notably: "The changes include German banks now having to withhold the tax on capital gains of account-holders who are church members."
This tax is levied by the churches. You may be against the fact that they get this right because you support a more strict separation of church and state (which is not in the spirit of the German constitution) but this is hardly something the state is to blame for.
(I'm not arguing that this naive computation makes sense, you pay different VAT rates or no VAT at all, depending on what you buy. I don't think you have to pay VAT on rent, which is a significant part of the income for many people and reduced VAT on most groceries)
In Munich my taxes on my pay check were around 45% as a software dev (including pension & insurance). So 70% total tax might not be far off the mark (assuming that you spend most of your income on VAT goods & services). Although you have to remember it's not 23% of your totoal income, but 23% of the remaining 55%.
There are also other hidden taxes though - import duty, corporation tax and council tax (cant remember if that was a thing in Germany), to name a few.
Once you account for the 17% being part of your remaining money, you get an effective incoming VAT tax rate of 8.5% (assuming you keep around 50%, if you keep more, this goes up)
I believe the highest amount of income tax you pay is around 60%, plus 8.5% you get close to 70%. However, most people will pay closer to 45 and 50% tax or less so a more realistic figure is 50% to 60% income tax.
It should probably also be included when you get benefits from things paid for in part by this, ie your insurances and pensions and such.
The blue curve in that graph is the nominal tax rate (Grenzsteuersatz) and the green curve the effective rate: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einkommensteuer_(Deutschland)#...
For example, say your gross wage is 5k/month, the net wage 2.8k and the employer pays 6k. So you take home about 47% of what the employer pays.
However, looking at the OECD figures for Germany of yearly tax revenue (all types of taxation) per capita (15 kUSD) and yearly average wages (45 kUSD), you'd think 30% was the average tax pressure. It then makes sense that you'd pay slightly more taxes, given that you probably earn more.
What the other person may have referred to is some combination involving the tax wedge (the ratio between labour taxes and labour cost not counting taxes), which is 50% in Germany currently, and was near 55% a few years ago. But that number is not relevant to this discussion...
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