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The problem with the skimple contention is that its not simple as that. As the problem with US corporate tax rates is the in details, with far far far too many deductions to off set income. As huge and profitable US corporations like GE pay zero US taxes. As I recall then US tax code is 43,600 pages, and most of those pages is one corporate tax loophole after
another in a endless profusion. As we have the best tax code money can buy.
Well, my intention was to show that using taxes as a percentage of GDP as some sort of metric for comparing countries is meaningless. You can argue that my charts are just as meaningless, but at least measuring by income is a more accurate reflection of the tax burden on the people.
If you wanted a more realistic comparison, you would have to look at services received and what each country pays for them. In that case, for the US you would have to add out-of-pocket health care costs to the total tax bill to compare them to countries where health care is government funded.
For 2011, private health care costs for the US was estimated at $2.7T. So if you add that to the tax bill, as a percentage of GDP, the US jumps from 27% to about 40%.
Another way to look at it would be that taxes & health care came up to about $6.5T, or about $20K per person in the US. That would be the number to compare with other countries.