Import taxes in Brazil are 60%, plus something like 18% on top of the product, shipping and the aforementioned import taxes.
The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics. One for you, one for the government.
That 6% figure is just the Simples Nacional rate for micro-businesses making less than 35kUSD/year. The actual income tax tops out at 27.5% at middle class thresholds. On top of that Brazil stacks social security tax, payroll taxes and a yet more taxes embedded in every single purchase. If you calculate all of this you can figure out something like up to 70% of a brazilian's income can flow to the government.
You say swedish companies pay 70% taxes. Well, swedish citizens get excellent services and a generally functioning country in return. Brazilian citizens pay 70% taxes and they get... Brazil.
This is very misleading. My salary in Brazil is on the very top end (with most of my income in the 27.5% bracket), and my average effective income tax rate in the last 5 years has been about 16%.
I'm not doing anything creative accounting-wise, I just max out my contributions to retirement accounts (PGBL) and get the correct tax deductions for all medical and education expenses.
We do have high import tariffs for individuals, and especially for consumer goods, as it's been pointed out in a different comment.
This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. But if you don't, you'll find that individuals don't really pay that much compared to other countries.
> This is very misleading.
It's your comment that's misleading. I was trying to account for the numberless taxes that exist and get applied to every single transaction. You zeroed in on income taxes then stacked some deductions on top.
> tax deductions
Discounting deductions from the nominal tax rate doesn't change the fact those taxes are high, nor does it change the fact you max out your tax bracket at middle class incomes.
Deductions are actually the bare minimum. If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights. Not deducting these expenses would be robbery. The fact most brazilians have plenty of deductions at their disposal is only evidence of how absurdly tax inefficient this country is.
These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax.
Finally, other countries no doubt have deductions too. I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison.
> This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism.
What a dismissive comment.
US government just banned Fable for foreign peasants like us. If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now.
If you think having some degree of sovereignty over our computing is "worshipping consumerism", then I don't know what to say to you.
Europe is currently fighting tooth and nail to develop some technological independence. China is creating Manhattan projects to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing and kick them out of their supply chains. If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind.
Brazil taxes foreign products in order to "protect local industry", then it taxes the local industry as well, which means pretty much nothing higher up in the value chain gets made here. Brazilian efforts at creating national computer technology date back to the military dictatorship, to the import substitution policies. The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact. What have we been doing since then? Nothing. Don't have our own industries, and we can't really buy the products produced by other nations either. This is why people leave: Brazil combines the worst of both worlds.
> You zeroed in on income taxes then stacked some deductions on top.
You're the one that brought up a comically inflated 70% number as if it were realistic. You can't act as if the nominal rate is the effective rate, then complain when I bring up numbers based on the effective rate.
> If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights.
No, it means I'm picky about my doctors. You seem to have ignored the tax-advantaged retirements accounts, though.
> These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax.
You just need to ask for receipts and put them in a (digital) folder. Then you spend 5 minutes tops _per *year*_ reporting their sums on your tax forms. If that's not enough, most of the numbers are pre-filled for you, you just have to review it. And you can download past receipts from the federal government's website.
> I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison.
Then do it. Tax legislation is very different across countries and even municipalities. Comparing nominal tax rates is completely meaningless. You need to compare the effective tax rate.
> If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now.
What part of that is due to an increase in taxes? Hardware prices have skyrocketed around the world due to limited supply. In fact, there's a record high number of computer hardware parts in the most recent list of products exempt of import taxes.
> If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind.
Our government is doing exactly that. The latest project in discussion in the Senate will give import tax exemptions and export tax exemptions to data center projects that reserve 10% capacity to the national market, invest 2% locally in R&D, and use clean energy. I think these numbers are ridiculously small.
If we had lower import taxes on data center hardware, how else would the government negotiate with data center companies to reserve capacity for our national interests?
Finally, I think it's a bit silly to think that _you and me_ running agentic coding LLMs at home furthers national interests. It does not. It furthers our hobbies. It's not even the kind of hobby that gives you relevant career experience which then goes on to strengthen our industry.
> The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact.
Lua was created in 1993 in a lab doing research for Petrobrás. I happened to graduate from PUC-Rio, so I know this personally: the Computer Science labs are receiving much more funding nowadays than they did in 1993. They're still cranking out excellent research, and, if I may say so myself, excellent alumni as well.
> What have we been doing since then? Nothing.
- Our electronic voting system; - Pix, the largest and most popular payment network in the world; - Elixir, LangFlow, Neovim, just to name a few that you probably know about.
> You're the one that brought up a comically inflated 70% number as if it were realistic.
Nothing "comically inflated" about it. That's pretty much the upper bound. It's not just income taxes, we've got property taxes, vehicle taxes, financial taxes, not to mention taxes on consumption, especially fuel, electronics, telecommunications, food, clothing, medicine, you name it. Employment taxes also reduce potential salaries. The brazilian doesn't have any savings. Sum all of this up, it can definitely reach 60% to 70% of income.
> You can't act as if the nominal rate is the effective rate, then complain when I bring up numbers based on the effective rate.
You dismissed entire categories of taxes in one fell swoop then started hedging with some deductions. Come on now.
> No, it means I'm picky about my doctors.
What, SUS not good enough? Of course not.
> You seem to have ignored the tax-advantaged retirements accounts, though.
Because it's tax deferral, not tax deduction. You're still gonna get taxed. You're basically claiming you're saving money by using credit cards. Brazil has no equivalent to the american Roth IRA either.
> You just need to ask for receipts and put them in a (digital) folder.
So... Time and effort. Multiplied by every deductible transaction. Plus the cost of actually learning how to deal with all this nonsense in the first place.
I know how much my time is worth. Even if it were "five minutes tops", it would definitely be a tax. And it absolutely isn't "five minutes tops".
> Then do it.
OK. Data from OECD's Taxing Wages 2026 provides total tax as % of labor cost figures.
Brazil is not in this dataset. Add INSS + employer contributions and Brazil can definitely reach the ~34-39% range, which by itself is already comparable to or exceeds the OECD average. USA is at around ~30%.However, Brazil actually shifts most of its taxes onto consumption. It leads the world in that particular tax burden: ~12.5% of GDP, roughly double the OECD average, ~56% of total revenue. Add that and we're in the ~49-55% range.
Meanwhile, Brazil ranks literally dead last in the world's most-taxed countries on welfare return to citizens. Literally 30th out of 30. It collects taxes at European levels and delivers developing country services. Europe has world class schools, healthcare, infrastructure. Brazil has drug gangs that dominate vast swaths of our territory and which perpetrate more homicides than active war zones. Quite the quality of life.
> Lua was created in 1993 in a lab doing research for Petrobrás.
And Reserva de Mercado was in force from 1977 to 1992. Petrobras had to follow strict rules under these restrictions, which included software acquisition. This directly drove the creation of Lua and Lua's predecessors DEL and SOL.
Lua is a direct child of the policies of the brazilian military dictatorship. Born from the constraints they imposed.
> What part of that is due to an increase in taxes?
The part where half of the price we pay is taxes. On top of the global shortage price increases.
> In fact, there's a record high number of computer hardware parts in the most recent list of products exempt of import taxes.
No. GECEX 852 (2026-02-04) actually raised taxes on 1252 IT/capital goods. What you're citing are the follow up tax exemption requests. Which only exist because of the tax hike. Which only apply to companies with actual industry projects. You and me won't see a dime out of this.
> just to name a few that you probably know about
Brazil does not have a single competitive semiconductor fab. No actual computer technology to speak of. Half a century behind China, to say nothing of the US. Electronic voting machines are commodity hardware, just assemblies of somebody else's computers with Linux and some custom software on top. Pix is the only brazilian achievement on your list that's impressive, and even that is still completely dependent on foreign technology.
> Elixir, LangFlow, Neovim
First you say that individuals doing cool things is irrelevant to the national interest. You just dismiss it all as hobby tier. Then you cite open source projects by individuals as evidence of Brazil's strength? Which is it?
Not the kind of hobby that gives you career experience? Ridiculous.
> I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)
Linus Torvalds, 1991. Need I say more?
I'm going to say more.
The demoscene influenced the games industry. Minecraft was made by a single guy just messing around. Bought for 2.5 billion. Tim Sweeney built ZZT, became Epic games, led to Unreal Engine, also drew heavily from the home computer scene, as anyone who ever played Unreal Tournament knows. Wozniak built the Apple I to show off at the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist club. Trillion dollar company. Facebook was once a literal campus dorm room project. Linus wrote git in 10 days to scratch an itch. Fabrice Bellard built ffmpeg. Python was Guido's christmas break project.
Individual computing capability is the seedbed of national computing capability. Everything is a throwaway toy joke project, until it goes into production and starts making money.
The brazilian government is not furthering the national interest. It's holding it back.