When you did that, what numbers did you get? When you did that, what numbers did you get? When you did that, what numbers did you get?
I would be interested in hearing more on that. I've never seen anything even close to that in the US, unless it involved garnishing, which is clearly not a tax.
I wonder if this article accounted for Building Permit Tax, Capital Gains Tax, CDL License Tax, Cigarette Tax, Dog Licence Tax, Fishing License Tax, Food License Tax, Fuel Permit Tax, Gasoline Tax, Hunting License Tax, Inheritance Tax, Liquor Tax, Luxury Taxes....there's plenty more....heck, there's about 8 of them just for the damn telephone! There are so many hidden taxes in the US its difficult to count them all. I doubt this article has considered all taxes.
If one takes a real number (tax revenues) and divides it by an imaginary one (GDP) all kinds of conclusions can be made. Also, the methodology is biased. It will produce a higher ratio for a country with a "free" social service (e.g. health-care, a popular topic now) than for one without it when the tax rates are the same: in a country with a "free" health-care the GDP does not include the cost of insurance premiums you pay (since there is none) while in a country w/o free health-care it does. (so the numerators will be the same but the denominator will be greater if everything else is identical). BTW, not all countries use the same methodology to estimate their GDP. The one US govt uses is not the most conservative one.
And these and other taxes are nonexistent in other countries? I talked to someone in mainland China, and bemoaned our 4 levels of taxes (local, county, state, fed). They said they had FIVE levels in their place. The article was crystal clear about which taxes were covered.
I lived in one of the countries mentioned. The one thing they are leaving out of the calcualtion is: we pay, and most of them DON'T, gas tax, sales tax, state tax, city tax, capital gains tax, etc . . . Also all of those countries have socialized medicine, family of four in NJ pays $1600/mo for healthcare. Add that into a $75k salary and you get another 25% of your income. This is a cheap and extremely misleading article. I would go so far as to say that we pay the HIGHEST taxes in the world, when you add them up. p.s. Sorry just saw the previous posts, take mine as a reiteration of those posts and from a pissed off overly taxed to death citizen.
Yeah, and I mean who minds it when you're pregnant and there are no beds for you in Canada. All good right? Yeah, Palin's an idiot, bla bla bla.. Zzzzz. Pathetic.
I have more or less organized my financial affairs to be as tax efficient as possible. Paying tax is not something I worry about anymore its not worth the effort and paying tax has not held me back in any way that I am aware of.
and you think they don't have state tax, city tax? You live on Mercury? It was clear these were PART of the equations used for the analysis. And further, try something called "VAT"...