link to original reddit post by /u/whatafoolishsquid
Ok, first I want to preface by saying I love the Spanish people and culture, but as an American expat, I just can't take the government much longer.
The government here takes over half of all the money I earn just to prohibit me from doing everything I want to do. For example, I have my US motorcycle license, but here I'd have to start from scratch, paying thousands of Euros for lessons to take a theoretical and practical exam just so I can ride small motorcycles, which I then have to do for two years before I can take the exam for full-sized bikes.
Everything else is the same: sailing, hunting, building a house. While maybe not outright illegal, the absurd bureaucratic and licensing processes for all these things are prohibitively expensive and more importantly prohibitively time consuming for someone who has to work a lot to pay his tax bills.
Of course, covid has just exacerbated all of this.
Despite ridiculous tax rates, they're going to put tolls on the all the highways due to "underfunding." They've decreased the speed limits on the all the roads and put up cameras everywhere because the government has lost fine revenue, which was a big portion.
The problem is my wife is Spanish, and she'd never leave her family. So basically this post is asking for relationship advice. I know this is a political subreddit, but I feel like it's the only community on Reddit that will understand where I'm coming from. On any main advice subreddit, they'll just tell me to be grateful for free health care.