Why Pay People With Cars
Viewed through an economic lens, the Belgian labor market reveals not a well-conceived government policy, but an accumulation of fiscal mismanagement. The Belgian remuneration model has devolved into a labyrinth of meal vouchers, eco-vouchers, and company cars. What politicians like to market as ‘targeted purchasing power policy’ is, in reality, nothing more than treating the symptoms of a fundamentally ailing tax system: the sky-high tax burden on labor. For foreign investors, this is not a quaint local quirk, but a matter of hard-nosed cost and risk analysis. Capital is mobile and seeks transparency, efficiency, and predictability. Belgium offers the exact opposite. When an international board of directors analyzes our tax wedge, the gross-to-net ratio comes as an initial shock. When they subsequently discover that this gap must be bridged through a patchwork of parafiscal exceptions, they lose interest. ...