With respect, Spain is one of the cheaper places to live in the EU. Perhaps your salary is even lower, but the nice thing about the EU is that you are free to get something better in a place where you get a salary that's appropriate for you. If that's not an option, you must live in a cheaper location. That really has very little bearing on your country's governance.
No, my salary was was above average. But the taxing starting at 62000 EUR, which is not that much if you want to buy a house and have a family is at 47%. The higher you try to go the more they smash you. The PIT at 300,000 (which is a lot, but anyways, you already pay more at that rate) reached 54%. After that you have to add things such as IBI (tax for owning a house), indirect taxes such as VAT (mostly 21%), gas (50%), electricity (50/60%), garbage collection, if you have a car you pay 7 taxes more... freelance workers pay around 300 euros just for working, every month, before having any incomings.
After that they pay VAT and social security. If you see the average salaries in Spain you will understand that what they are doing now to the freelance workers (autónomos) is an abuse: a person that does not know how the coming months are going to be gets taxed increasingly more over the years and they did a reform that will raise the costs for this group (depending on earnings) by a lot. It can even quadruplicate the costs per month for people that get around 5,000/6,000 gross.
If you start to count and they can smash you like 60% or more. Things are going to go higher on top of that. It is abusive.
With that amount of taxes the debt should be lower and the services better. Where are we spending the money? Mostly in pensions (9.5 million people in Spain).
In Spain you have young engineers working for less than 1,500 eur/month, some working for around 2,000 (I mean Master's degree both), but you have local police, which is two years studying, which get 1,800 eur/month. Some people have pensions of over 2,000 euros at the same time, because the pensions are a Ponzi scheme. We have as much as 3.5 million public workers. To get an idea, in Germany, with 83 million people (vs. 47 million in Spain), they have around 800,000.
There is a lot to fix... and the unions... do not get me started on the unions and politicians. In the meantime, the private sector is going weaker and weaker and paying higher and higher bills to maintain all this.
