Skip to main content

Taxes, taxes

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VirtualBox and CentOS - a technical success story

Most of my readers are probably firmly in the Microsoft Windows world when it comes to using a computer. What is Microsoft (MS) Windows (in any one of its many incarnations, whose most common and recent members are Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7)? It's the operating system (OS) of the computer - for most people computers aren't very usable without an operating system. The operating system sits on top of the hardware and provides the complete logic for everything you see when running a computer - it connects to and registers various hardware devices while booting, like graphics card, sound card, mouse and monitor, and provides functions like user management, a graphical user interface (GUI), process management, and much more. The operating system does not include things like web browsers, mail programs or office suite programs (yes, there are alternatives to MS Office, see OpenOffice ). There are many other operating systems, some with restricted niche usage ( RISC ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The president of Germany

On June 30th Germany elected a new federal president (Bundespräsident in German). The 10th federal president of Germany is now Christian Wulff, 51, until now the prime minister of Lower Saxony, a German state. Christian Wulff is a member of the CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union). The media outside Germany have scarcely been aware of this event, yet it was accompanied by a great deal of drama in Germany. What happened? What's the role of the German president? Is there any wider significance? What does the German Federal President do? The German Federal President (I'll refer to the office as Bundespräsident from here out for simplicity) has a largely ceremonial office. Like the Queen of England, the Bundespräsident is the offical head of state. Like the Queen of England, most of his activities (there has not yet been a female Bundespräsident, who according to the rules of German grammar would be the Bundespräsidentin) are ceremonial - greeting foreign heads of state, giving...
Post a Comment
Read more