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Sorry America, Your Taxes Aren't High (bloomberg.com)
Americans generally feel they're being over-taxed, especially around this time of the year. But is that really true? An article on Bloomberg investigates: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development analyzed how 35 countries tax wage-earners, making it possible to compare tax burdens across the world's biggest economies. Each year, the OECD measures what it calls the "tax wedge," the gap between what a worker gets paid and what they actually spend or save. Included are income taxes, payroll taxes, and any tax credits or rebates that supplement worker income. Excluded are the countless other ways that governments levy taxes, such as sales and value-added taxes, property taxes, and taxes on investment income and gains. Guess who came out at the top of the list? No. Not the U.S. At the top are Belgium and France, while workers in Chile and New Zealand are taxed the least. America is in the bottom third.
Just because others are taxed higher doesn't mean we aren't over taxed. I'm not saying we are overtaxed, but I think taxes could be lower, or spent more wisely.
Forgot to ad the forced insurance payments that are in fact taxes. $900 a month for both my wife and I. I pay more in taxes+the forced insurance payment than the canadians do and they dont have to pay co-pays and their pharmaceuticals are not allowed to be price gouged.
So add that in and now you have the REAL number to compare, because those countries all have universal healthcare for their citizens.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Americans may pay less taxes, but we also get far fewer services.
The closest we have to retirement pensions is Social Security, which is a laughable amount of money. In other countries, you can retire without dedicating a chunk of salary to a gambling scheme---the ubiquitous 401K.
We have no public health care, so we pay higher costs out of our own salaries.
Our public education system is woefully underfunded, and higher education is very costly. It would be nice if everyone smart enough to be a doctor or an engineer could just decide to go to school. Who knows?---it might even help with the health care costs and H1B issues if students didn't have to mortgage their futures just for a chance at those professions.
Let's not forget the embarrassing state of our infrastructure. If a bridge collapses, maybe the media frenzy will force the politicians to do something. Until then, they can rust, rot, or erode away.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
"...Excluded are the countless other ways that governments levy taxes, such as sales and value-added taxes, property taxes, and taxes on investment income and gains. Guess who came out at the top of the list? No. Not the U.S.
Guess who made an accurate tax survey? No. Not the OECD.
What the fuck is the point of a survey on tax burden when you're going to exclude a lot of it? My property taxes aren't some meaningless number, paid for by scrounging loose change from underneath my car seat.
This survey is as pointless as asking what megacorps pay in taxes every year...you know, excluding tax loopholes of course...
You get the largest military in the history of the planet. That's what stupid Americans want, so that's what stupid Americans get.
I don't respond to AC's.
Old lizards who vote already have single payer healthcare, and they won't vote to share their Medicare with young lizards.
You can simplify the tax code without pulling out this "fair tax" / flat tax bullshit.
Progressive income taxes work, and they can exist simply, in a manner that doesn't require lawyers and accountants - but guess who writes the tax law?
Get rid of deductions, stop treating different types of income differently, stop issuing financial aid through tax credits and subsidies (most of which just end up in the pocket of H&R block anyway)... Simple and still progressive to insure the people who can afford to pay more do pay more.
They already have a skin in the game, through sales tax, gas tax, etc. These folks are spending, and a substantial amount of their income goes towards subsistence. One way or another, through the dole, incarceration or taxes, they'll be utilizing the system. This simply lightens the load on the other two. It's one of the reasons a progressive tax works, in the pragmatic sense. "Fair" should have nothing to do with it if it simply hits us for more somewhere else in the budget.
Sales tax is often above 6%, even here in Utah. There are state, county and city components to it. The federal gas tax is the low part. State more than doubles that. We pay an additional 29 cents a gallon on that. Given the cost of gas that is an effective 25%ish tax rate. Social security tax is very significant amount, varying by income. Then again remember the second half of the equation. We are required to by health insurance and nothing is covered. We have to pay out of pocket on top of that to use the health insurance. We have to save for our own retirement as we do not get government pensions back out of our money, and in fact can't even really start collecting social security (our own money) until later and later years. Now approaching the average age that a male dies. We basically get very little for our tax money, and have to make up that difference ourselves, costing us more. This means that the real effective tax rate is higher, and actual cost of living can be quite high do to the lack of services provided for your taxes. The corporations get cheap tax rates, the extremely rich pay very little, and the middle class carries a significant portion of the tax burden. Look at the effective rate the middle class pays and what they get.
I live in a European country. I pay 25% sales tax, a 40% income tax and a monthly charge for my pension plan but that's not a tax to my mind, it's an investment. Additionally I pay tons of all kinds of fees every time I want to use a public service, my car is subject to fuel taxes and road taxes but I expect this 'taxing by a thousand tiny cuts' phenomenon also exists in the states so let's stick with the big taxes. If I was an American I'd be paying 25% income tax and 0-10% sales tax depending on where I lived. On the face of it I'd say the American has it significantly better than I do especially because the average pay in my industry is about 30% higher in the US. However, I do get universal healthcare and free university education for my 40% income tax and 25% sales tax and the crime rate is ridiculously low here compared to the US so it's not all bad.
I was surprised to find that Canada pays less than the US overall.
You shouldn't be. Canada is rather more sanely managed than much of the US.
And for that Canada has a rudimentary universal health care system, and the US has what?
The US has a schizophrenic public/private system where nobody is in a position to control costs. We have universal health care but only for retired and some (but not all) poor people. We have great hospitals but nobody to keep costs in check. We refuse to insure millions of people thereby costing ourselves far more money when they inevitably show up in the emergency department of a hospital to get treated at far higher cost. We allow drug companies to charge whatever they want because... reasons. If you wanted to design a financially irresponsible health care system you'd have a hard time developing one more irresponsible than the one the US has.
Crumbling infrastructure and an overpriced military that funnels money into the military's suppliers and from there to the executives of those suppliers.
Our military isn't so much over priced as over funded. We have WAY more military than we could possibly justify or need. We spend more on our military than then next 8 largest military budgets combined, most of whom are allies. We have an annual federal deficit of $600 billion and guess how much we spent on our military last year? Yep, $600 billion. We basically borrow every penny we spend on the military, thereby screwing future generations because baby boomers are paranoid idiots.
The rich can leave, or at least move their wealth to somewhere the government can't reach.
Some do, most don't because they value a safe western society where property rights are respected and the second there is conflict or a threat the ones that did leave come running right back to the US. Personally I'd like to see stricter rules on this, you take your money and leave to avoid taxes and the government isn't responsible to repatriot you when the inevitable conflict brings them running back.
You want the benefits of living in a protected western economy you should have to pay the taxes to support that.
free university education for my 40% income tax and 25% sales tax
TBH that's probably not worth it. Hard to be sure because obviously the 40% + 25% goes to other things as well. You've probably spent a lot extra in taxes than you would have if you'd just paid for college.
Probably true if those were the only two perks but I notice you did not include universal healthcare in your quote which means I don't pay a dime even for extremely expensive treatments that often ruin US households. You also cut out the low crime rate which I consider to be a major plus of life in this country. There are also many other things like free daycare for everybody, no toll roads, a well maintained infrastructure, 100% internet coverage at speeds that most Americans can only dream of, ... the list goes on. I can see how some people might be interested in a minimal state with low taxes where most of the things that are public services or utilities in my country are privatised and where you are shit out of luck if you are too poor to afford health insurance but I still do not feel like I'm being shortchanged or robbed and I'm not so annoyed by the universal health insurance also covering very poor people that I'd abolish the system. Funnily enough I know a number of people who were pretty annoyed with things like mandatory health insurance and mandatory pensions that they fled the 'socialism' over here and moved to the US so they could skip that stuff and have a bigger disposable income. Interestingly a number of them came back here years later to make use of the 'socialism' over here that so disgusted them to get expensive operations and cancer treatments because they had not bothered to save for such eventualities. That ended when the parliament passed a law stating you have to have lived in country for over a year before you are eligible for treatment through national universal health insurance system.
If you think about it, you'll realize how stupid this whole thing is. Regardless of the form of taxation, the net result is the same - money diverted from the productivity generator (employee, company) to the government. So why do we need so many taxes?
This makes a base assumption that services provided by the government are not productivity generators.
According to you:
*Roads are not productivity generators
* People who are not sick don't generate productivity
* Educated people don't generate productivity
* People who don't live in fear of crime don't generate productivity ...