A Brazilian entrepreneur living in Tübingen, a small university city in the south of Germany, filmed himself walking through a park, feeding ducks, and systematically dismantling one of Europe's most durable myths.

The video - posted on April 26, 2026, to a YouTube channel with around 10,000 subscribers - now has over 51,000 views. The creator, known as Galego 2, was not ranting about crime or weather. He was doing something more uncomfortable: running the numbers. He works remotely for American companies. He owns his own business. He can, in his own words, choose where to live. And Germany, he concluded, is close to the last place he would choose.

His argument was not that Germany is bad for everyone. He was explicit that for Brazilian working-class and middle-class migrants, Germany offers a genuine quality-of-life upgrade. The average Brazilian middle-class salary sits around R$ 3,000 to R$ 4,000 per month - roughly €600. A German middle-class salary of €3,000 per month is not comparable. It is a different life. His point was sharper and more interesting than that: Germany is a poor deal for anyone who already earns well and has the freedom to choose.

That gap - between what Germany costs and what Germany delivers - is not just one man's personal taste. It is a structural economic problem that German policymakers have been unable or unwilling to fix.

The Background

Germany spent most of the post-war 20th century as Europe's benchmark. Its trains were reliable. Its infrastructure was envied. Its companies paid well. Its public services were funded by high taxes that people broadly accepted because the output was visible and functional.

That social contract - you hand over a large slice of your salary, the state provides excellent services in return - was the basis of Germany's appeal to skilled immigrants for decades. Pay your income tax (the portion of your earnings the government takes, set on a sliding scale based on how much you earn), accept the high costs, and receive a well-organized, high-quality life in return.

That contract is now under strain. Germany's top income tax bracket kicks in at a relatively modest income level - the average combined corporate tax rate sits at around 30%, far above most other EU member states, and employed workers at higher income bands face rates reaching 42%. On top of that, healthcare is not included in that figure. Freelancers pay 100% of their health insurance costs themselves, unlike employees who split it with their employer. So the true cost of working in Germany, once health coverage is factored in, lands most high earners somewhere between 45% and 50% of their gross income lost before they see any of it.

Social security contributions - the separate payments that fund pensions, unemployment insurance, and care - add another layer. A Berlin-based commenter on the video reported that 38.2% of his salary disappears every month: 21.65% in social contributions and 16.54% in income tax. After deductions, he takes home €3,300 per month.

For that price, Germany used to offer a deal. The question being asked more loudly now - not just by Brazilian YouTubers but by German economists, German workers, and German policymakers - is whether it still does.

What Is Actually Happening

Galego 2 spent six months in Germany before deciding, firmly, not to stay. His critique breaks down into four specific failures: taxation without proportional return, a housing market that is broken at a structural level, infrastructure that does not match the price tag, and a regulatory environment that actively punishes entrepreneurship.

On housing: the numbers support him. Germany is already missing around 550,000 apartments in 2025, particularly in social housing and cheap rentals. Building permits have been in freefall - the number of newly built dwellings declined by 14.42% year-on-year to 251,937 units in 2024, the first significant decrease after years of relative stability. For 2025, only 220,000 to 230,000 completions are expected across Germany, the lowest figure since 2015. That is happening while demand - driven by urbanisation, immigration, and household formation - continues to grow.

In Berlin specifically, active market vacancy is 0.3%, against the 2 to 3% that would indicate a balanced market. The housing shortage in the city alone is estimated at around 100,000 units. Asking rents for resale apartments stand at €16.35 per square meter, an increase of 8.3% year-on-year, with prices up 45.5% over five years.

In a country where more than half of households rent rather than own - 52.8% in 2024, up from 47.5% in 2014 - this is not an abstract investment statistic. It is the central variable in whether ordinary life is affordable. Galego 2 describes the situation with precision: he has the money to pay €2,000 to €3,000 per month in rent. The apartments simply do not exist. And when they do come to market, landlords frequently prefer to rent to German nationals with local employment contracts.

On infrastructure, the video draws a direct comparison with Italy - a country Germany is typically assumed to surpass in every logistical metric. The creator had lived in Italy previously and found the trains more frequent, better connected, and cheaper. This is not a fringe opinion. Deutsche Bahn, Germany's national rail operator, has faced sustained criticism for delays, track closures, and underinvestment. The video captures the creator describing how approximately half of his attempted train journeys ended with a rail replacement bus service instead.

On taxation for entrepreneurs, the picture is even less flattering. The average total combined corporate tax rate in Germany is 30.1%, significantly above most other EU member states. But the practical total load for a self-employed individual - once income tax at 42%, mandatory private health insurance (which for the self-employed is fully self-funded and calculated at higher rates), and VAT administration are included - is considerably higher. The creator describes it as an environment more hostile to entrepreneurship than Brazil. For someone running a lean business with clients abroad, the cost-benefit simply does not compute.

The Money Trail

The economic logic here is not complicated once it is made explicit. Germany operates a high-tax, high-service social model - but the service quality has degraded while the tax burden has not.

That degradation has a traceable cause. Germany mothballed its nuclear power plants following Fukushima in 2011, accelerating the transition to renewables without a stable baseload alternative. The result was a structural increase in energy costs - electricity prices in Germany are among the highest in Europe. Infrastructure investment was deferred during the Merkel years under a philosophy of fiscal austerity, prioritising balanced budgets over capital spending. The rail network, the internet infrastructure, and large portions of the housing stock were left to accumulate deferred maintenance. Building permits fell 19.3% while housing targets of 400,000 annual units went consistently unmet.

The bill for that period of underinvestment is now arriving. The people paying it are primarily renters, commuters, and anyone whose income is high enough to face the top tax rates but whose life is not insulated from the broken public services those rates are supposed to fund.

There is a further dimension to this that the video captures intuitively: the value gap hits different people differently. A senior software developer earning €6,000 gross per month and taking home around €4,000 net is, by most measures, living well. €1,500 in rent leaves €2,500 for everything else. That math still works. But for an entrepreneur whose entire income flows through a company - and who therefore faces corporate tax rates on top of personal income tax, plus self-funded health insurance at rates calibrated for higher risk - Germany extracts far more and returns far less.

In 2024, 1.7 million people moved to Germany, but 1.3 million left - a net gain of around 419,000, far short of the 600,000 net workers the OECD says Germany needs annually just to maintain its current standard of living. The country is losing more people than the headline immigration figures suggest, and it is losing them selectively. A study by the Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung found that between 2024 and 2025, approximately 21% of people in Germany were considering living abroad in the long term - and emigration intentions were significantly higher among first-generation immigrants and their descendants.

The people most likely to leave are precisely the people whose tax contributions Germany most needs.

What People Are Doing About It

The most direct response is geographic arbitrage - the strategy of earning income pegged to a high-wage economy while living somewhere cheaper. Galego 2 himself is the clearest example. Remote workers and entrepreneurs with location flexibility are choosing to extract their income from high-paying markets - typically American tech companies - while residing in places that offer better cost-to-quality ratios: Portugal, Spain, parts of Italy, or simply returning to their home countries.

Around a quarter of a million German citizens move abroad each year. OECD figures show that for every 100,000 Germans, 170 left in 2021 - five times the rate of the United States and ten times that of Japan. That outflow includes German nationals, not just immigrants reconsidering their options.

Within the comment section of the video - which generated over 1,300 comments and functions as an informal survey of the German immigrant experience - a parallel picture emerges. Several long-term residents with families describe a fundamentally different experience. One commenter who has lived in a small town near Göttingen for six years describes home ownership at 1% mortgage rates, good schools, and two cars in the garage. Another Berlin resident of ten years describes broadly agreeing with the critique while noting that the calculus changes depending on family situation, professional stability, and which part of the country one lives in.

The consensus that emerges across the comments is nuanced in a way the video itself acknowledges: Germany is a reasonable deal for employees with steady contracts, particularly those with children who value school quality and public safety. It is a poor deal for mobile entrepreneurs, remote workers, and anyone who arrived after the housing crisis deepened.

Germany's government response has focused on immigration rather than cost reform. The Act on the Further Development of Skilled Immigration introduced more flexible rules for recruiting third-country nationals, including new residence permits for experienced professionals and a points-based Opportunity Card for job seekers. What the policy does not address is the underlying value equation: lowering the barriers to entry does not help if the country's cost structure makes it unattractive to stay.

The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Luxembourg - all cited in the video as more appealing alternatives - offer comparable or higher salaries with lower bureaucratic friction, better infrastructure-to-cost ratios, and, in the case of Switzerland, dramatically higher net incomes. The competition for mobile talent is real, and Germany is losing it.

The Bottom Line

Germany built its reputation on a simple promise: pay the taxes, get the services. That trade-off worked when the trains ran, apartments were available, and the internet was fast. It is harder to justify when the country is short 550,000 apartments, the rail network relies on replacement buses, and entrepreneurs face effective tax rates above 50%. For workers on local employment contracts with families, the deal still holds - just about. For anyone with the ability to work from anywhere, Germany is increasingly the option you choose only if the alternatives are worse. And the alternatives, as the video makes clear, are multiplying.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Galego 2 (Augusto Galego), a Brazilian entrepreneur who works remotely for American companies and spent six months in Tübingen, Germany.

What: A viral YouTube video arguing that Germany's cost-to-quality ratio makes it a poor choice for skilled, mobile professionals - particularly entrepreneurs - who pay high taxes and receive degraded infrastructure, a broken housing market, and slow internet in return.

When: Published April 26, 2026, reaching over 51,000 views within two weeks.

Where: Filmed in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, southern Germany.

Why: Germany's post-war social contract - high taxes in exchange for high-quality public services - is under structural strain after years of deferred infrastructure investment, a housing construction collapse, and a regulatory environment that disproportionately burdens entrepreneurs and mobile workers. The critique resonates because the underlying data supports it.