Average taxation is a meaningless concept because it includes the welfare recipients who leech on the economy. I analyzed the middleclass who produce the GDP. Germany is strangling them with high taxes that average > 50% in total.
Additionally the Euro was a subsidy to German exports at the expense of the rest of Europe, which is thus now bankrupted. But German banks are radically leveraged to the rest of Europe.
Germany (and Europe and Japan) will collapse this year. QE won't work again, because globally the marginal-utility-of-debt has gone negative. BOHICA. Enjoy.
Btw, I have one German grandparent, one UK, and one French. The 4th one is native American.
its only 20% if you take your pension insurane into it. you are free to to care yourself about a future pension.
it is just law because we in germany dont want to care of people that dont do something for their pension before they get old and cant work.
that is why either you have to pay in a state controlled pension fund as a tax or pay into a private owned pension fund.
So the 20% is mandatory one way or the other? And make that 40% because apparently the employer pays a matching share (which comes out of salaries whether you like to admit it or not, because profit is a zero-sum game).
The western governments will end up confiscating (nationalizing) all the private pension funds, because the societies are bankrupt.
Westerners will lose their pensions. Massive rationing of health care.
The grand liberal, socialism experiment is massive, FUBAR Tragedy of the Commons failure. Megadeath likely coming 2019ish.