I think this title is a bit sensationalist. It's true that a middle class Portuguese, with the extremely heavy income/property taxes we have to pay, will find it very difficult to live in Lisbon's or Porto's city center in a medium-upper apartment.
Lisbon (and even more Porto) do have an extensive metro line though, and you can rent/buy an apartment on the outskirts (although still served by metro line), even with the low liquid wages. But more than that, vast areas of the country are extremely deserted and housing is extremely cheap there (a similar house in the interior goes for about 20% of one in Lisbon/Porto).
Also, there's the problem of the government having destroyed most of the middle class to embezzle the metric of the "minimum wage". Constant mandates to increase the minimum wage (and very heavy taxes on anyone that earns more than that), make so that companies can't discriminate between good and bad workers. Most workers get paid almost the same, and as such, there's no point in trying to be a better worker.
I'm one of the "lucky ones" because I bring home about €2000/month. My company has a total cost with my salary after taxes and other state contributions of €3880/month.
Now, I know that you can have the argument that we get a lot of "free" services in return, but, sadly, no, we don't. Decades old mismanagement (governments use these "free" services to cater to their party members and get them nice administration positions for which they don't have any experience) and some outright corruption, destroyed the quality of most of these "free" services.
The SNS is in absolute shambles. Our mortality rate is the highest since 1913 (ok, you can attribute that COVID). Our infant mortality rate, the highest since 1982 (sorry, but you can't say this one is due to COVID). Now, what happened to cause this? 7 years ago, we got a center-left government into power, one of their first measures was to destroy a system where the hospitals were public, but the management was done by a private company - these hospitals had much better metrics for both costs and quality of service. They abolished that, and replaced the hospitals' administration by party members. This is the result.
Like it happened with the SNS, similar stuff happened in a lot of other areas. In the end, the government's answer is always the same: increase taxes - which strangulates the economy and destroys the middle class, and, funnily enough, transforms us all into people dependent on "government's money" and their subsidies - that ensures that they keep in power because nobody can imagine living without those "free" services with the low liquid wages we have.
> Decades old mismanagement (governments use these "free" services to cater to their party members and get them nice administration positions for which they don't have any experience) and some outright corruption, destroyed the quality of most of these "free" services.
Tangential, but I recently visited lisbon and realized how terribly mismanaged the airport is, as well as TAP Air (Portugal's flag airline). Everything should be well, because it's a pretty big airport but yet it was a mess, and delays of several hours was apparently an every day experience (which I learnt the hard way). It did give the impression of having root causes in corruption and complete mismanagement of public funds.
We lived in Spain for 4 years and Portugal for 1. I love the country and the people, but from a management perspective, the place is a disaster. It made Spain feel like some sort of futuristic perfect society managed by hyper-efficient AI by comparison (and that's saying something).
I'll just comment on the taxes, as someone who owns a business - yes, they are high. But not that much compared to the rest of Europe. I'm sure by now you're thinking "but other countries make a lot more money!!" - and that's exactly why taxes are high here. Our GDP is much lower, so if our tax rates were also lower, how would the government afford machines for hospitals, vehicles, fuel, and so on when all these things cost the same as elsewhere in Europe? The only thing that is significantly cheaper here is labor, after all...
Yes, things aren't good. But there's no easy solution either. I personally prefer to pay higher taxes than to compromise our public services further, or privatize them in a fuck-the-poor way.
> But more than that, vast areas of the country are extremely deserted and housing is extremely cheap there (a similar house in the interior goes for about 20% of one in Lisbon/Porto).
Yeah. Given that the large cities no longer qualify for 'golden visas', I think the government wants external money to go to these areas.
> Decades old mismanagement
That's quite sad to hear.
I was (guess I still am) thinking about moving to Portugal at some point, perhaps for retirement. Every single person I have ever spoken to... they can only sing praises to Portugal. Sure, sometimes they complain about bureaucracy. That's probably worrying, since most are brazilians and we supposedly used to that. If they complain, that must be bad :)
I think this title is a bit sensationalist. It's true that a middle class Portuguese, with the extremely heavy income/property taxes we have to pay, will find it very difficult to live in Lisbon's or Porto's city center in a medium-upper apartment.
Lisbon (and even more Porto) do have an extensive metro line though, and you can rent/buy an apartment on the outskirts (although still served by metro line), even with the low liquid wages. But more than that, vast areas of the country are extremely deserted and housing is extremely cheap there (a similar house in the interior goes for about 20% of one in Lisbon/Porto).
Also, there's the problem of the government having destroyed most of the middle class to embezzle the metric of the "minimum wage". Constant mandates to increase the minimum wage (and very heavy taxes on anyone that earns more than that), make so that companies can't discriminate between good and bad workers. Most workers get paid almost the same, and as such, there's no point in trying to be a better worker.
I'm one of the "lucky ones" because I bring home about €2000/month. My company has a total cost with my salary after taxes and other state contributions of €3880/month.
Now, I know that you can have the argument that we get a lot of "free" services in return, but, sadly, no, we don't. Decades old mismanagement (governments use these "free" services to cater to their party members and get them nice administration positions for which they don't have any experience) and some outright corruption, destroyed the quality of most of these "free" services.
The SNS is in absolute shambles. Our mortality rate is the highest since 1913 (ok, you can attribute that COVID). Our infant mortality rate, the highest since 1982 (sorry, but you can't say this one is due to COVID). Now, what happened to cause this? 7 years ago, we got a center-left government into power, one of their first measures was to destroy a system where the hospitals were public, but the management was done by a private company - these hospitals had much better metrics for both costs and quality of service. They abolished that, and replaced the hospitals' administration by party members. This is the result.
Like it happened with the SNS, similar stuff happened in a lot of other areas. In the end, the government's answer is always the same: increase taxes - which strangulates the economy and destroys the middle class, and, funnily enough, transforms us all into people dependent on "government's money" and their subsidies - that ensures that they keep in power because nobody can imagine living without those "free" services with the low liquid wages we have.