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Norway, the Country Where No Salaries Are Secret (bbc.com)
In Norway, there are no such secrets. Anyone can find out how much anyone else is paid -- and it rarely causes problems. From a report: In the past, your salary was published in a book. A list of everyone's income, assets and the tax they had paid, could be found on a shelf in the public library. These days, the information is online, just a few keystrokes away. The change happened in 2001, and it had an instant impact. "It became pure entertainment for many," says Tom Staavi, a former economics editor at the national daily, VG. "At one stage you would automatically be told what your Facebook friends had earned, simply by logging on to Facebook. It was getting ridiculous." Transparency is important, Staavi says, partly because Norwegians pay high levels of income tax -- an average of 40.2 percent compared to 33.3 percent in the UK, according to Eurostat, while the EU average is just 30.1 percent. "When you pay that much you have to know that everyone else is doing it, and you have to know that the money goes to something reasonable," he says. "We [need to] have trust and confidence in both the tax system and in the social security system."
I mean I know we Americans like to pretend to have low taxes, but, in reality, we just have a lot of misdirection and backdoor taxes.
Every fee you pay for a government service, especially the ones they impose on you like driver's licenses which need to be renewed for some reason and the same with car registrations. Then they setup their regulations to maximize offences so they can disproportionately rake in money from the poor. Those fines are all taxes really.
40%? That isn't far off from some estimates I have seen for totals of what a lot of Americans give our worthless government.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The US has a much different culture when it comes to social justice. Old countries, like Norway and Japan, have more of a sense of community than the US, where no-one gives fuck about anybody but themselves. In business negotiations a deal can be struck where the opposing party may suffer irreparable damage, where in civilized countries though is given to the other party's survival.
The US was founded on conquest, genocide, slavery, and war. The Land of the Free's constitution was written by slave owners who had stolen and killed the original land owners.
Taxation in Norway and and other EU countries are mostly funding social projects, not so in the US where the 100% of personal income tax revenue is funding the military. Wars are invented to keep the military industrial complex rolling in perpetuity.
Most democratic countries have political parties with differing opinions, not so in the US where there is only one more party than in China.
The school system in the US is designed to make people into stupid unquestioning consumers, and soldiers, that will vote idiots like Trump and Bush into an office, for which there is no requirements for any relevant qualifications or talent. Trump has never been elected to even a minor political office. He is a dirty simpleton unschooled trust-fund-baby businessman whose grandfather founded their fortune by renting hotels to prostitutes, and has many bankruptcies and scandals behind him. He makes George Bush look like a smart guy.
But it would go a long way in calling bullshit on an employer who tells you no on a payraise because " budgets are tight " all the while paying each of their execs a yearly bonus that exceeds your lifetime income.
This sort of transparency would cause a great deal of discomfort for those companies who regularly lie to their employees.
In fact, those companies would find it difficult to keep any employees and, in the end, might have difficulty being a company at all when all of their talent leaves because of it.
The Income Inequality gap in the US is so wide now, this level of transparency would likely cause a great deal of anger at best.
An insane amount of violence at worst.
It's still news to Americans that the world doesn't implode simply because someone knows how much you get paid, or why you went to see the doctor last week.
No, the world implodes when you get cut off from potential promotions or new jobs because you get looked up ahead of time. An insurance company might reject you because of that rough spat of pneumonia a year or two back. It's never the data itself that's the problem; it's the access that *others* get to this data, and the decisions (and thus actions) they take in response to such data that creates problems.
Information is power, and giving the public access to that particular information is bullshit.
That "the insurance company might reject you" is something that pretty much only the morons in the USA put up with.