How’d you like to score a good job as an engineer or a doctor, or, hell, a mid-to-high-level building manager, and suddenly start paying 42% income tax? How’d you like to be a working schmoe making minimum, and have to pay 19% sales tax?
Yeah. I wouldn’t, either, and the Germans are voting with their feet.
With Merkel’s government effectively one in name only, and the utter paralysis of Grand Coalitions in a parliamentary system, it’s not getting better any time soon. Germany’s at the “eggs gotta get broke” stage, and the problem with parliamentary democracy is that unless you’ve got a Koizumi who can stare down his own party while persuading the electorate… no eggs are going get broken.
JimDesu
/ August 30, 2006Ouch. That’s really painful when it’s easier to make money in France than your own country. Damn.
happycrow
/ August 30, 2006Yes, since the French have their *own* brain-drain problem…
blair
/ August 30, 2006Go Socialism! Yeeeaaah!
Has anyone put tax cuts on the table yet?
happycrow
/ August 31, 2006Are you kidding? IN GERMANY? Those folks are fed a constant diet of “the US is a Dickensian hell which must be avoided at all costs.” Not everybody buys it, but enough drink the kool-aid that the Laffer Curve may as well be fighting words politically, in spite of Ireland.