Golgatha
Lifer
- Jul 18, 2003
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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.
This, so this. Most of the higher percentage GDP countries provide more government services. It's all about value per dollar taxed. I get the joy of seeing how much less I'm making in take home pay tomorrow. Should be fun!