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Total tax burden includes sales tax that you pay on what you spend, property tax, gas tax, payroll taxes, taxes on utility bills, dog license fees, etc. I don'

by JeffL 15y ago

Total tax burden includes sales tax that you pay on what you spend, property tax, gas tax, payroll taxes, taxes on utility bills, dog license fees, etc. I don't think 40% is completely far fetched. Not sure how exactly one would calculate this, though, other than looking at taxes as percentage of GDP and maybe trying to fit yourself in there somehow based on your tax bracket as a ratio to other people. But with an average total tax burden of 26.9% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu...), 40% for someone in an upper bracket doesn't sound so crazy.

varjag 15y ago
Lumping all fees and duties together is not what people normally assume. Usually, just the income tax is compared, as it is present in most economies of the world. Here in Norway an income tax bracket of 50% for a well-off middle class family is fairly normal. On top of that, sales tax is 25%, gas is mostly made of taxes (about 2.5 times what you'd pay in the US) etc. Still somehow there's less bitching about taxes (or gas price) per capita than you hear from overseas :)
- alnayyir 15y ago
  You get a lot more for your money. Sweden too.
- vukk 15y ago
  I hear a lot of bitching about food and gas prices for example here in Finland. Also very few people DON'T have a problem with some sort of bureaucrat, for example idiotic and incoherent health inspectors, bureaucrats deciding who gets subsidized etc. The best way to deal with bureaucrats here is to catch them making a mistake and then using that to make them sign the papers. (Usually this involves following their orders until there is some kind of incoherence in them, and thus is costly if those orders involve eg. building/renovating something that is fine as is). For some reason the favorite explanation nowdays is that the EU is in fault here, even though this crap has been going on before the EU existed.

by JeffL 15y ago

varjag 15y ago

Lumping all fees and duties together is not what people normally assume. Usually, just the income tax is compared, as it is present in most economies of the world. Here in Norway an income tax bracket of 50% for a well-off middle class family is fairly normal. On top of that, sales tax is 25%, gas is mostly made of taxes (about 2.5 times what you'd pay in the US) etc. Still somehow there's less bitching about taxes (or gas price) per capita than you hear from overseas :)

alnayyir 15y ago
You get a lot more for your money. Sweden too.
vukk 15y ago
I hear a lot of bitching about food and gas prices for example here in Finland. Also very few people DON'T have a problem with some sort of bureaucrat, for example idiotic and incoherent health inspectors, bureaucrats deciding who gets subsidized etc. The best way to deal with bureaucrats here is to catch them making a mistake and then using that to make them sign the papers. (Usually this involves following their orders until there is some kind of incoherence in them, and thus is costly if those orders involve eg. building/renovating something that is fine as is). For some reason the favorite explanation nowdays is that the EU is in fault here, even though this crap has been going on before the EU existed.