And that man clearly does not live in such a state, nor did I (or anyone else I think) claim that his circumstances apply to the entire usa. You’re wrong in assuming that other people are not aware that different places have varying laws and tax systems.

Your whataboutism defence of regressive tax systems is also very strange to me. That other places have unfair practices in place, is no excuse to put up with an unfair system in any one place. Call them all out on their brokeness, but if you do call them out, you’ll have to be more specific in your example(s), state things that are actually verifiable instead of some vague whataboutism.

Ps, while I did not think your whataboutism defence was relevant, this “Little wonder that property ownership rates are generally so far below american ownership rates.” was easy to verify and it turned out to be false. Home ownership rates are on average slightly higher in Europe than in the usa, here’s statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-rate-in-europe/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it’s easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.

Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he’s a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he’s deriving no income from that wealth, since he can’t rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he’s a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.

That has to be the most regressive tax I’ve heard of in western Europe. Absolutely excessive and I’m sorry it’s happening to you.

Belgium has a home value tax as well, based on fictional rental income + a very convoluted calculation + different % surcharges per council. I find back that it’s on average about 700 to 800 euros per Flemish adult person, but it has large variations. It causes a lot of grumbling, but for most people it’s not considered excessive.

And this is why in most civilized countries, progressive income taxes make up the majority of the government budget. Basing taxes on non income/investment related metrics screws over the poor + lower middle class. It’s a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

In my Eu country, and also the neighbouring countries, the general rule for a detached building is that it has to be build 3 to 5 meters (depending on the local rules) from the terrain boundary. If the builder wants to build closer, then they have to build a blind wall on the boundary with certain minimum fire + insulation requirements. If then someone else builds against that blind wall, that someone else is expected to buy “half” of the existing wall, ie: pay the first builder some money.

So we fortunately don’t get those dystopian tightly packed detached housing neighbourhoods.

The shared wall between a home and any other building is also required by law to have certain minimum acoustic insulation values. But there’s plenty of old buildings where this isn’t the case yet. Living in an apartment building without proper acoustic isolation is horrible, I’d rather live in a dystopian detached house, so maybe that’s why those houses are still popular in North America and Australia: guaranteed proper acoustic insulation.

From what I’ve read, Zelensky as comedian made intelligent political and anti corruption criticism. Making jokes about the bad things in life, highlighting them, setting the stage for something being done about those problems. Broader than his on screen personality, he had middle class beginnings and on the back of his comedy work, he build a successful career as TV producer/executive. You probably know more about this than I do.

Trump as TV personality looked more like the most clueless person in the room, while all the actual work was done by others behind the scenes. No intelligence, no social commentary. Before his role in the apprentice, Trump had started his business career as a Nepo baby, and as a businessman he had failed every venture that he had tried, each time leaving a bloodbath of unpaid bills behind, a reverse Midas. And once his face was known from TV, he started with large scale scams like Trump University.

Those are 2 very different career paths.

What I find annoying about these memes is that it’s always about how Germany killed 6 million Jews during ww2, while they actually killed 17 million ordinary people in ethnically motivated mass killings. That’s 11 miillions victims of ethnic cleansing that seem to be forgotten.

This has got to be one of the most stupid memes ever.

The percentage of Soviet citizens that were put into prisons/gulag camps/colonies will have far exceeded the percentage of us citizens currently incarcerated in the usa, and in far more inhumane circumstances.

Unless the op is trying to deflect from the problems of the USA penal system by drawing attention to a far worse system, I don’t get the point of this meme.