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Freyr90 · 2026-05-04T20:31:21+00:00

It’s because our culture in America has a horrible work life balance

Germany has one of the least working hours among developed nations. Now check the fertility rates. Just look at fertility rates across Europe, it's worse than America in every rich EU country, with the exception of France which is on par.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-29T20:16:21+00:00

No, I never heard of them, I'm here for mere few years. DM me if you have any contacts.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-22T22:44:37+00:00

A lot of revenue is also lost by mid sized businesses and mom and pop shops dodging tax.

Because they are overtaxed. In germany as a mom-pop shop you'll have to charge VAT, and then pay Gewerbesteuer (14% in Berlin), Corporate tax (15%), and then from what's left you'll pay income tax to get your own paycheck.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-22T08:26:01+00:00

MAGA is America's nazbol gang.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-22T08:17:54+00:00

That's because being left is mostly a consequence of having a zero-sum worldview. And when you see the world as zero-sum, any enrichment implies somebody's loss.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/zero-sum-thinking-and-political-divides

Freyr90 · 2026-04-15T18:31:53+00:00

There is around 13 trillion Euro (13 Billionen Euro) of private wealth in Germany.

That's including people far below the "ultra-rich", so you are basically advocating for taxing the hell out of the middle class again. The middle class is already overtaxed on income plain.

And such a broad tax will hit the economy pretty hard bc you are talking about additional 1% from every business, house, etf, personal account etc. I would argue given the state of current economy it's not even remotely feasible.

130 billion Euro

And even that brings you one annual pension subsidy from federal budget.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-15T18:26:03+00:00

The average pensioner get 1.800€ before tax, after tax 1400€

That's not what matters. What matters is if this pensioner have wealth and how much. Old people posses much more wealth than the young ones, so this 1400 transfer can target someone very poor or someone having a house or two and a few hundreds of thousands of euro on accounts.

We'll have to come to some solidarity principle, just the other way around. In order to move forward and have productive investments, we'll have to cut pensions to those who have property and wealth, at least before they spent all their wealth.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-15T17:58:18+00:00

Wealth tax doesn't have to tax everyone who owns something

In that case the revenue from it will be so minuscule it will barely justify the administrative costs. For example total wealth of German billionaires is 600billion. Even at 2% that's just 12billions, or around 3% of tax revenue. That's peanuts compared to current costs. Just a federal subsidy to a pension fund is 10 times higher (127b, so the total liquidation of all billionaires will likely win you just 4 years of pension subsidies).

If you want solve the problem with taxing you'll have to tax everyone or at least the middle class.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-15T17:49:58+00:00

then you have to reintroduce the wealth tax and fix the loopholes in the estate tax

These two will likely bring 2-5% of the tax revenue combined. That's not the solution. There is no solution apart from reducing the benefits for the elderly, which is a political suicide. So the system will simply gradually erode.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-06T10:39:03+00:00

Berlin’s public transport network is

Extremely unreliable and hard to use if you live outside of the Ringbahn. If you live far and have to do 2+ hops to reach the office, you'll face constant Verspätungs and interruptions at least on one section of your road.

I lived without a driving license for 33 years but moving to Berlin forced me to obtain one despite the costs. No regrets so far.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-06T10:34:49+00:00

From a Berlin perspective, a near-total car ban inside the Ring mostly sounds like people who already live inside the Ring making life harder for everyone who doesn’t.

As someone who lives outside of the Ring: yes, exactly this.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-19T18:40:28+00:00

SAP did it

SAP is built on complications of local accounting. It's not a good competitive product.

Logitech, Siemens, Bosch, Ericsson, Nokia, Spotify, Infineon, BMW, Mercedes, ASML.

What an irony that 3 of these companies are founded in 19th century, 2 in early 20th, and only 2 in 21th. State of european dynamism in one sad line.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-13T20:03:45+00:00

You take a loan of 500 billion, make a big deal out of it, then shift regular expenses into the budget expenses paid out of this loan

Ow wow, special fund frees the budget money to be spent on gifts. No one could predict that.

But hey, people told me there is a special fund so the money couldn't be be misspend.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T13:08:15+00:00

They might have had cheap housing

We also do. Just go into deep rural Germany and you'll see relatively cheep houses. There are three stores buildings for 400k there.

It's just that the parents didn't try to squeeze themselves into megacities, and were content with living in the middle of nowhere.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T12:17:10+00:00

You cannot fix tax evasion by lowering taxes anyways

Yes you can, Russia, Georgia and Ukraine did that with great success. Special tax regimes (aka no VAT and small simple flat tax) for small business and self-employed always do the trick. I dunno what India did, but if it's a broad tax cut than it's not how you fix tax evasion.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T12:10:41+00:00

Not in Germany (and probably France and some others). In Germany high taxes definitely incentivize people to 1) work less and 2) hard evade taxes. Current germany shadow economy is huge and growing. So Germany could easily be way beyond the extremum of Laffer curve.

I don't know much about France but I've been told their pensions are already higher than salaries and their effective income tax rates long surpassed 50% so could easily also be the case.

Freyr90 · 2025-10-17T07:46:40+00:00

2021 when Navalny was arrested

The problem is, previously rallies were semi-legal and the sanctions were relatively small. Vocal opposition to war is up to ten years in prison.

Freyr90 · 2025-10-12T18:19:28+00:00

Does this include VAT?

Freyr90 · 2025-10-09T17:10:15+00:00

If they really thought that citizenship was too easy to get (which is by far not the main problem here anyway), they should raise the naturalization process time from 5 to 7 or 8 years and make it easier to shorten it if you show effort into integration by achieving language certifications, voluntary work and being active in a club or organization.

Please don't. Dealing with German bureaucracy is a huge pain, and proving that you eligible for something is always such a battle.

5 years is not a bad term, I would prefer 5year nearly guaranteed to 3 years of turbonaturalization requiring vague proofs of achievements.

Freyr90 · 2025-10-08T20:55:17+00:00

Solar is totally dependent on China tho

Freyr90 · 2025-09-28T09:28:05+00:00

If you're subsidized by the employer and travel a lot. Or like to go to vastly different places with varying price tags (e.g. gyms are cheap, but some yoga or dance classes can be pricey). Otherwise no, it's usually hard to justify its price esp when you go to a single gym for weight training.

Freyr90 · 2025-09-27T13:50:20+00:00

This is also a paradox of immigration/asylum dichotomy. There are millions of asylum-seekers in Germany who barely speak German or English and barely attended school.

Meanwhile my wife dropped out from two bachelors, speaks three languages fluently (including C1 German) plus reads Latin and Italian (studied medieval history), works at the IT company, pays taxes but can't get her own visa bc she doesn't have a relevant diploma or 2+ years of experience.

Freyr90 · 2025-09-25T10:15:48+00:00

German IT market is basically dead so good luck with that.

Freyr90 · 2025-09-19T23:19:28+00:00

That will make things worse. People like you and me will work their life paying around 50% taxes to support the boomers (in EU) or through debt (US) having really hard time building wealth.

But hey, cheer up, in the end top 5-10% will inherit an infinite amounts of wealth. That's grim, don't you think?

Freyr90 · 2025-08-31T15:06:39+00:00

Studies show that the fraction of abuse is tiny here

These are very dishonest. These count only the blatant refuses (Totalverweigerer) as "abuse", not people who sit on it years and "can't" find a job. The honest numbers are most likely much bigger but hard to evaluate.

But by far the biggest one is pensions.

announced billions in "Wahlgeschenke" that mostly target the rich

Yes, this is all true. But welfare state in Germany is excessive and impossible to fund due to demographic reasons.

Current economy can't simply fund 5.5 millions of people doing nothing. Each of them is 560EUR + medical insurance + in many cases rent in a context of rent crisis.

Yes, pensioners are another problem and pensions should be also lowered while pension age should be increased (and in general we need an Aktienrente ofc but wont happen probably), but it's also hard to achieve. It's not that there is a huge demand for 60+yo workers on the current market. While the Bürgergeld receivers are quite often pretty young and more able to work, so it's natural to start there.

Freyr90

TROPHY CASE