How do you travel and commute? By car? If so, millions of Germans who don't own a care are funding your means of transport.

I will keep that in mind next time I am staring at the rear of a diesel bus while stuck in traffic.

I know you're being facetious, but yes. Public transport is cheaper per person per kilometer than cars. Gasoline and motor vehicle taxes are very low in comparison to the cost of road maintenance and environmental and societal effects of individual transport, so you're indeed profiting off of tax money.

To which I’m also contributing by driving myself. Those roads aren’t built for my pleasure of driving to the office. They also serve crucial role in supply chains.

In fact, those buses are on exactly on those same roads. The existence of those roads facilities convenient public transportation.

These 2.5 billion euros is almost nothing for a country the size of Germany. I mean, it’s 0.1% of the total budget (€1762.4 billion last year). It’s nothing. Are you really getting all huffy & puffy about paying for a scheme that provides transportation to poorer people and helps the environment? And are you the same about all other tiny expenses, or is it just this one in particular.

€2.5B here, €2.5B there; pretty soon you’re talking about billions of Euros.

I think this is a good program, but anything that costs 1/1000th of a large country’s budget is a large expense to my mind, not “nothing”.

No, I just said that I paid twice as much as last year for the heating oil and my tax obligations are increasing and this doesn’t benefit everyone. It turned into this discussion.

Your 30 cent gas discount is funded by all the people not owning cars. Which costs 500 million Euros more than the 9€ ticket by the way. Be grateful for that and stop huffing and puffing all over the comment section with snide comments on how the world is unfair to you.

Like that is helping me with heating oil. And mind you, not only me. Everyone renting places, owning places, offices heated with oil will get hit by that. I do not see how a discount on transport for three months is going to help those people.

I also have a mother in Germany who I pay the rent for. She's a pensioner with a minimal amount of money. I am very much looking to Nebenkostenabrechnung next year for heating.

> The more one tries, the more one becomes the source of funding for others while not really getting any personal gratification or gain.

It's unfortunate that you can't derive any gratification or gain from your more-than-half of the extra money you make when trying more. But it probably won't help to blame it on less wealthy people commuting to work.

I’m not blaming anybody. I am simply saying that it’s an advantage which isn’t universal.

I could say the same about being wealthy enough not to have to rely on public transportation

You’re exactly right. The German system is setup so that you make use of it only if you are on average or below average income. Anything more is a diminishing return. This is for pension, maternal/paternal leave, health insurance etc. The reasoning being that “so we have more equal society”. Yes equal but there simply is no incentive to progress without being penalized. The lucky ones are those with “old money” or those who prefer to rely on the system instead of themselves.

The top marginal income tax rate in Germany is not much higher than in, say, the US.

The real injustice is that capital gains (i.e., unearned income) are taxed less. But of course that's also very common internationally.

You're proposing cutting government support for the poor so that they'll try harder to escape poverty? Since I'm pretty sure there's already plenty of incentives to not living in poverty

Where exactly did I say that?

"there simply is no incentive to progress without being penalized". Perhaps I misunderstood?

Yeah I think you did. Here is an example, maternity leave is 65% of salary but capped at 1800 euros. If you make 6000 a month and want to make use of maternity leave, you have to lower your living standards significantly so you can stat with your child. This would make a lot of sense and fair for someone making ~2800 though. But as a high earner, and a high tax payer, i cannot use this system “feature”.

Presumably you could take the 1800/month and make up the difference with savings? Even with the maternity leave conditions, it is clearly better to be the person making 6000 than 2800.

But I still don’t understand your broader point. Mathematically a progressive tax system is going to have high income people pay more taxes than they receive back in government services, to fund the services provided to low/zero income earners

An average income earner has the incentives to go on maternity leave without lowering their living standards, thats not the case for higher earners without burning through their savings. Its simply unfair to contribute a lot without getting a fair share (65% without cap would have been more fair)