Why don't Germans get as excited about high taxes as Americans? The coalition government in Berlin is increasing the national value-added tax from 16% to 19% on January 1 2007 (imagine paying a hidden sales tax of 19% on nearly everything you buy), gasoline prices, much higher than in the US anyway (how would you like to pay $6 a gallon? We do over here), are going to rise another 6 Euro cents a liter on January 1st (that's $0.27 a gallon), the tax deduction for interest income is being sharply cut - the list goes on and on. And yet no one seems to notice very much. No American politician who voted to increase taxes like that would be re-elected.
As a native-born Seattleite who's been living in Germany since 1988 and in Munich since 2000, I plan on occasionally commenting on German and American culture, politics, IT, travel and whatever else I feel like writing about, from the perspective of one with a foot in each country.