lower 37% of workers not paying income tax; Top 1 percent pays 31% of all income tax

(Korean article)
Summary: Percentage of working Koreans that don’t pay income tax down from 36.8% in 2019.

Interestingly enough, all recent news coverage on said topic uses data only provided until 2022, maybe recent data somehow is not analyzed?

Anyway,comparison of the percentage of non-income-tax-paying-workers is double of Japan, which is about 15%, and 6 times of Britain, which is about 5%. According to this article: https://naver.me/FhNF5HST (한경)

Yes indeed this is a yearly topic, but still.. I don’t know, doesn’t this feel a bit too.. socialist? Per se?

And while 한국경제 is indeed a pro market capitalist media corp, the data is still true.

—> I don’t understand why this country has such draconian tax laws.

This is quite common knowledge,but we literally have the highest inheritance tax laws on the planet, which peaks at 50% for regular folk and 60% for majority shareholders of a public company, mostly designed to get at chaebols- Which is also the reason that the aforementioned 한경 periodically publishes some article bashing the tax rate.

Ok, honestly, I don’t care for the whole chaebol thing, I don’t care one single bit if billionaires are paying 50% or 60% or whatever.

What does bug me though that the country is somehow so socialist to the extent where they start enforcing a 50% rate at 30억, or (for non Korean folk) about more or less 3 million dollars.

This could work, for lets say a relatively low income country like vietnam or mainland china, and it actually somewhat did, since the tax laws (including the bracket) that exist today were drafted and put into place in the early 1990s, and were last touched (which means that the rates were never adjusted for inflation) in the year 2000.

-> Which is now 24 years ago, and during those 24 years Korea has gone from a country with a gdp per capita slightly higher than current mainland china to a gdp per capita surpassing Japan.

So due to these circumstances, alongside inflation, income and asset prices rose at an astronomical rate, namely housing, as nationwide-famous-for-being in a “good neighborhood” 은마 apt was 2.8억 (260k usd) in 2000, and hit 22.4억 (2.24m) in august last year. which is a total 791% increase in the past 24 years. Meanwhile the tax exempt/brackets increasing, you guessed it: Zero.

Seoul’s apartment prices on average hit 12억 (1.2m) in 2022, so according to the current tax rate if you have real estate in Seoul with a pricetag over 10억 (1m) you have to pay out an insane 40%, and if you have more wealth in other forms it only goes up from there.

Conservatives, rich people, etc, alike have complained of this for years now, but nobody seems to do anything about it, no? I know the left in this country can say anything to downright North Korea & China level socialist policies- stuff like “land shouldn’t be privately owned!”, and I know that this country has had a socialist ‘mindset’ for the past 500 years ever since the joseon dynasty when they shut down trade and Goryeo’s healthy merchant activity bc “merchanting doesn’t create anything”, but still, we can levy a 40% taxrate to a self-made millionaire but can’t make 30% of the working population pay anything whatsoever because ‘oh they’re so.. pitiful..?’

The left needs so suck it up and lower the rates or raise the exemption bracket, and the right needs to let go of their ‘family run businesses are better because they think long term’ mindset.

This is just a opinion.